"A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep."
Yes it is, of course it is. IT claims to be an engineering and engineering is about solving problems, rationally, and under current constrains.
That means that when the current option is dismissing a case and trash all data , a meagre 150US$ SATA disk is a perfectly suitable alternative.
Well, no, it's still not a suitable alternative because what happens after you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs getting the case to trial when the disk drive crashes and you can't produce the evidence that you said you had? For the cost of a week's worth of an attorney's time you can store the data properly, no need to shop at Newegg for the cheapest possible solution.
IT is not about implementing unreasonable solutions, it's about pointing out why a proposed solution is not reasonable. My boss may ask me to replace our $4000 Cisco switches with $200 Netgear switches, and my job is to explain why that's not workable in our environment despite what seems like a cost savings.
Properly backed up storage costs about $8,000 per terabyte a year. For backup, checking, replacement, and spinning drive costs.
I may have understated the cost by saying "A few thousand dollars", but I know that my incremental cost to add 2TB of storage is around $3500 including the cost of disk at both the primary and remote site (but excluding bandwidth). This assumes that I add an entire disk shelf at a time, which is more than 2TB.
Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?
A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep..
If you are going to quote me in order to pontificate on the obvious, at least quote the first TWO paragraphs.
I didn't include the second paragraph because it doesn't change my point:
DEA: Buy two drives. One for yourselves, one for discovery. You can take it out of the taxes I paid last year. Pay me back when you collect reasonable discovery charges [cooley.com].
When drive #1 suffers a head crash and massive corruption, how do you recover your data when drive #2 starts developing random block errors?
Without RAID and constant consistency check with automatic rebuild, two independent drives are only marginally better than one.
I noticed the summary conveniently forgets to mention that there are also several hundred boxes of paper evidence.
When you already own entire warehouses to hold evidence, storing a few hundred boxes of paper is not expensive
And of course it isn't like these are 2 terabytes of Blu-ray movies: it's probably mostly text and image files, and that is a lot of text documents to keep track of and make sure are backed up on a regular basis, with a full chain of custody to ensure they aren't being tampered with and whatnot. Sure, 40 TB sounds like a small amount of data, but then again if you introduce 4 or 5 backups with tampering resistance... it suddenly starts looking like quite a bit.
Any of the major storage vendors will be happy to sell you a WORM storage array that prevents tampering and has remote replication.
Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?
A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep. It should at a minimum be on a RAID array that does automatic scrubbing for data errors, and is backed up offsite (either through tape or live replication).
But still, that shouldn't bring the cost beyond a few thousand dollars - which seems a small price to pay to keep a 5 year old case alive.
We (The United States) offer them the ability to keep their land and people under peace and not the premise of war. We (The United States) have the military strength to undermine another sovereign state's ability to maintain control of factories and production of said goods. This is what we offer to them and will do so until we cannot do so.
I wonder if that's true in modern times - if we declared war on China because we wanted control of their factories and suddenly lost access to Asian electronic component imports (even if other Asian countries remained friendly to the USA, China's military may prevent them from manufacturing or exporting any goods), would we be able to keep our war machine running? Do we have the capacity to make the semiconductors, resistors, capacitors, and build the circuit boards that we rely on for our "smart" military? Could that capacity be ramped up as quickly as we ramped up our industrial manufacturing capacity during WWII? A single chip fab can take billions of dollars and years to bring online - and probably relies on many foreign imports to make it run.
When I sent my dad a Linux computer because his old Windows machine was taken over by malware (no amount of remote help with running various cleanup tools helped), I set it up to automatically SSH to my home server every 5 minutes and open a tunnel back to his computer desktop's VNC port as well as an SSH port as a fallback.
it came in handy when I had mistyped his home wireless router's WPA key before sending the computer, I just had him plug the computer directly to one of his router's LAN ports, and then I was able to remote in and fix it.
Reading from a tablet is like reading with someone shining a flashlight into your eyes. Particularly at night a tablet, with its backlight, keeps you awake. An eink reader does not have that problem.
I have both a Kindle and Nook Color. While I do find the Kindle to be easier on the eyes for extended reading, I've never had the nook keep me up at night, and my partner said that the Nook is much less noticeable to her than the kindle plus book light (and she doesn't like it at all when I leave the bedside light on for reading).
So even though I prefer reading on the Kindle, in bed I usually stick to the Nook for reading after her bedtime (I'm running cyanogenmod on the Nook so I can run both the Nook and Kindle apps but I usually strip the DRM off of books after purchase so I can read them on either device natively).
I've read elsewhere that a backlight will keep you awake, but I still don't understand how a dimmed down backlight is any different to your eyes than a bedside light or clipon booklight that not only lights up the display to the same level as the backlight, but also most of the bedroom.
In general they are lighter as well making them easier to hold.
I barely notice the difference in weight between the Kindle and Nook Color, but I find a larger tablet to be heavy and unwieldy as a book substitute.
For people who want to consume from the web a tablet is the right choice. For those of us who want to read the eink readers are the right choice.
But for those that want to do both a tablet is the right choice since a tablet makes an adequate eBook reader, but an eInk reader is terrible at web browsing (though my experience is limited to my early edition Kindle so newer devices with a touch screen may be better at web browsing, even if limited to black and white)
Page turns - maybe these were older models, but it drove me crazy that every page turn required a blank of the screen followed by a redraw of the new page.
If you think that's bad, a friend once lent me an old fashioned book -- she said it was made out of "paper" (which she claimed is made out of dead trees! Yuck, I hope that's not true since I had my fingers all over it).
Every time I turned the page, there was a brief moment where I could see both the left half of the previous page and the right hand half of the next page! Who ever dreamed up that UI?! It was so confusing and annoying.
My Kindle briefly flashes the page to black during page turns which makes a lot more sense from a UI standpoint than mixing half the content of the previous and next pages together.
In all seriousness, I found this to be a complete non-issue a few pages into my first book -- now I never notice the flash.
I own a Kindle (and a Nook running cyanogenmod), but I still read most books on paper.
Not because I don't want to read them on the Kindle, but because a used book is often half (or less) the price of a used book including delivery. And I can still sell it for a buck or two when I'm done.
I read the occasional title from Baen or Smashwords, but I've bought only a handful of Kindle/Nook titles in the past 2 years.
As long as you don't care about reading new releases as soon as they are published, buying used is the way to go.
As an example, looking at a random book from a 2011 bestsellers list "The Tiger's Wife". Prices including delivery (assuming Amazon Prime free delivery):
New Hardcover: $10.50 (two day Amazon Prime delivery) Used Hardcover: $6.57 (two day Amazon Prime delivery) New Paperback: $10.20 (two day Amazon Prime delivery) Used Paperback: $6.37 (standard shipping) Kindle Edition: $11.99
Why pay more for the Kindle edition than it costs to buy and deliver a brand new book? About the only time I prefer an eBook is when I'm traveling and don't want to carry a heavy book(s) along with me.
Amazon and Azure use different API's, if you use one vendor's API, you're locked into that vendor. There might be libraries available that hide the vendor specific API's but that's outside the scope of the article.
The UK didn't say it was going to "storm" Ecuador's embassy. (The origin of that claim? None other than Ecuador.) What the UK said is that Ecuador's embassy may be stripped of its diplomatic status [guardian.co.uk] (a move which would have serious diplomatic fallout), and police may arrest Assange.
How do you think they are going to arrest him if they strip Ecuador's diplomatic status? Just knock on the door and politely ask him to come out? They could do that now if that's their plan. I think you only need to look at the FBI + New Zealand's military-style assault on Dot Com's mansion to see how the UK will extract Assange.
People looking for ebooks in places like Amazon often have trouble figuring out which ebooks have DRM and which don't because Amazon does not advertise that information.
How can they NOT make that information easily available?
Why do people not return books more as soon as they run into an unadvertised DRM problem?
Because when people who are not Slashdot readers buy a book at Amazon, and it works on their Kindle they are happy. Few ordinary users try to move eBooks between platforms, and if they do try and fail, they shrug their shoulders and stop trying.
But maybe this label will help make more people aware of what they are giving up when they buy DRM infected content. The music studious seem to have learned their lesson since most (all?) music is available unencumbered.
Why does it cost money to NOT publish my phone number?
Because they make money providing their customer lists to the people who publish phone directories, political organizations that request the list, telemarketers, etc.
Why does it cost money to renew my car registration online via an automated system instead of at a building that costs rent and overhead with a human employee?
Because the whole point of a car registration is to serve as an impediment to prevent any idiot from buying a car. Doesn't work very well, but can you imagine how bad it would be if people who couldn't scrape together $35 once a year were allowed to operate and maintain a car? It costs a lot more than $35/year to keep a car safe; oil changes alone will be at least twice that, let alone regular maintenance that isn't covered by warranty, like wheel alignments, new tires/balance, brake service, etc..... And do you really expect somebody who can't afford $35/year to be driving a new car that's under warranty?
I think you missed his point - he wasn't asking why you need to pay a registration fee (mine is closer to $300/year since it's based on the value of your car), but why you need to pay $3 extra to pay online when the cost to run the website is (presumably) cheaper to the DMV than accepting payment via a live person. While it's true that a website costs money to build and support, that must be much less than the cost to build, maintain, and staff a building.
Pretty sure they used a CDN or two to handle the traffic, and its possible the CDN uses a hybrid mode which works basically like combining a regular CDN server network with a p2p torrent network
Can you expand on what you mean by this, not many users have CDN client software installed to facilitate P2P..
Is there some benefit to pubkey over simpler symmetric encryption systems, given that NASA was in a position to do a secure key exchange before the rover left?
With public key cryptography, you only need to keep the private key safe - the secret key never needs to leave the room in which it's generated and only the public key needs to leave the room. They can give the public key to anyone to load in the rover and load it months in advance, and even if someone can extract the public key from the rover's key store, it doesn't matter.
Additionally, If the private key is believed to be compromised, they can securely replace the public key on the rover key in-transit (assuming the attacker hasn't gotten there first) by sending a new firmware image that replaces the compromised key with a new public key. Even if an attacker is watching the stream and sees the new public key getting sent to the lander, he can't use that new public key to launch a new attack, he'd have to gain access to the new secret key.
In contrast, if an attacker compromises the secret key in symmetric key encryption, there's no way to replace it on the rover since the attacker can decrypt anything that's sent to the rover so if they send over a new encryption key, he can see it.
Most hacks would be stopped by public key cryptography, just sign the code with a secret key known only to a scientist (use a split key so it takes more than one person to sign a file), and then it's impossible to corrupt the image after it's been signed, and impossible to upload your own image even if you have your own transmitter (or can take over NASA's transmitter).
Of course, if your hackers break into the computers used to compile the new firmware image, then they can have all sorts of back doors that insert their nefarious code into the firmware, like maybe code to make the rover drive around to spell out "All your Mars base are belong to us" in the martian dust.
But I think any hacking group sophisticated enough to pull off that kind of hack is going to spend their time on more profitable pursuits since this kind of hack will likely not even make the news if NASA decides to cover it up, they may just say "Oops, system malfunction, we lost contact with the Rover, no further data will arrive from Mars." Then they send up a Roomba to vacuum up the evidence of the hack.
They'll survive because nobody with two brain cells to rub together enjoys reading on a backlit and always-refreshing screen.
Spoken by a person reading slashdot on a "backlit and always-refreshing screen".
There's a big difference between spending 30 minutes browsing the web and spending hours reading an eBook. I always use the eInk Kindle instead of my 7" android tablet for reading a book - it's just easier on my eyes. And while I can browse the web on the Kindle, it's not really the best platform for web browsing so I use the tablet (or my laptop) for that.
Google Mail? It might be good, but companies better check their contracts. Since the small companies usually don't have public stock, Sarbanes-Oxley may not be an issue, but with clients is may be. To boot, not all mail providers be able to furnish documentation of SOX compliance. Come audit time, you really want that stuff ready to go when the auditor is present and requesting documentation.
You would think that a company like Genentech with 11,000 employees would know a thing or two about whether or not their Google Apps email solution meets all of the regulatory requirements they are subject to.
Finally, who is the customer with Google Apps, the people using it... or the advertisers? Google might have a conflict of interest in that department. I'd rather stick with a mail provider paid for completely by the end user.
You seem to be confusing the free version of Google mail with the paid Google Apps for Business which defaults to not serving ads.
Zimbra may be good enough for a college student to get their latest Facebook confirmation E-mail, but in a professional environment, it is not up to the task. This isn't to say OWA is perfect, but there are a lot of business functions that are Exchange-only:
Zimbra has Outlook and mobile device integration, all secured by TLS/SSL
Connectors. Yes, these are nothing more than just TLS connections with known certificates, but a lot of companies feel better when their clients are able to have a dedicated, encrypted connection.
I don't even know what that means in the context of an email server? Are you talking about a persistant connection between Outlook and the email backend or a VPN?
In any case, Zimbra can do more than deliver Facebook status messages, they have a pretty broad customer list
Policies. Almost all devices work with Exchange, and fewer and fewer lie to it about capabilities. If a device went missing, triggering a remote erase will work regardless of which maker or OS is on the device. No other E-mail system has this in place.
Data at rest encryption. Exchange can pretty much guarantee that any device touching it either lies convincingly about encryption (like earlier Android versions), or actually implements it.
Zimbra has had remote wipe for years. Even Google Apps has remote wipe capability. And they can also enforce encryption and other ActiveSync security policies.
If one wants to play GSA contracts, this might be a major factor for state or Federal business.
Believe it or not, there is competition in the email server market, but most companies don't bother because once they buy the CALs and build a server infrastructure to run their other Microsoft applications, Exchange doesn't add much more to their Microsoft cost. But some companies are still finding it cost effective.
2: Exchange. I'm sorry, but there is nothing else out there. You HAVE to have Exchange/Outlook because clients want dedicated send/receive connectors oftentimes (a lot of clients use homegrown root certs so a hacked CA in Elbonia can't cause E-mail to be divulged.) Exchange isn't great, but the rule of thumb is "you use Exchange in your business, or else you don't have a business."
You should open your eyes and look around if you think Exchange is the only mail/calendaring solution out there. I'm not sure why a hacked CA in Elbonia can cause email to be divulged but having my own CA will prevent that - is a small business owner really going to install his own trusted certs on every computer and device that accesses his exchange server, or is he just going to tell employees "Ignore certificate warnings when you check email since I'm using self-signed certs".
I moved a 500 person company to Zimbra with great success -- saved a significant amount of money on licensing and it was more reliable than their old Exchange server. Many enterprises have migrated to Google Apps - Genentech has 13,000 employees on that platform.
If I were starting a small business, I'd definitely use something like Google Apps for email and calendaring, plus it can handle just about all of the word processing and spreadsheets that a small business needs while letting employees have full access from home or work.
But for accounting software, I'd go with commercial software that my accountant is familiar with.
To protect against geo-scale catastrophies, keep a set at a remote relative's house, swapping in a newer backup each time you visit. I have relatives at 200 and 600 miles away, not really far enough for widespread catastrophes, but better than nothing. I bet you could think of some prospects.
What widespread catastrophe will span 200 or 600 miles (as long as they aren't both coastal cities subject to ocean borne threats like tsunami and hurricane)? Aside from large asteroid strike or Yellowstone super-volcano eruption in which case, keeping your photographs safe will probably be less important than keeping your family alive.
Slashdot Mirror
"A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep."
Yes it is, of course it is. IT claims to be an engineering and engineering is about solving problems, rationally, and under current constrains.
That means that when the current option is dismissing a case and trash all data , a meagre 150US$ SATA disk is a perfectly suitable alternative.
Well, no, it's still not a suitable alternative because what happens after you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs getting the case to trial when the disk drive crashes and you can't produce the evidence that you said you had? For the cost of a week's worth of an attorney's time you can store the data properly, no need to shop at Newegg for the cheapest possible solution.
IT is not about implementing unreasonable solutions, it's about pointing out why a proposed solution is not reasonable. My boss may ask me to replace our $4000 Cisco switches with $200 Netgear switches, and my job is to explain why that's not workable in our environment despite what seems like a cost savings.
Properly backed up storage costs about $8,000 per terabyte a year. For backup, checking, replacement, and spinning drive costs.
I may have understated the cost by saying "A few thousand dollars", but I know that my incremental cost to add 2TB of storage is around $3500 including the cost of disk at both the primary and remote site (but excluding bandwidth). This assumes that I add an entire disk shelf at a time, which is more than 2TB.
Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?
A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep. .
If you are going to quote me in order to pontificate on the obvious, at least quote the first TWO paragraphs.
I didn't include the second paragraph because it doesn't change my point:
DEA: Buy two drives. One for yourselves, one for discovery. You can take it out of the taxes I paid last year. Pay me back when you collect reasonable discovery charges [cooley.com].
When drive #1 suffers a head crash and massive corruption, how do you recover your data when drive #2 starts developing random block errors?
Without RAID and constant consistency check with automatic rebuild, two independent drives are only marginally better than one.
I noticed the summary conveniently forgets to mention that there are also several hundred boxes of paper evidence.
When you already own entire warehouses to hold evidence, storing a few hundred boxes of paper is not expensive
And of course it isn't like these are 2 terabytes of Blu-ray movies: it's probably mostly text and image files, and that is a lot of text documents to keep track of and make sure are backed up on a regular basis, with a full chain of custody to ensure they aren't being tampered with and whatnot. Sure, 40 TB sounds like a small amount of data, but then again if you introduce 4 or 5 backups with tampering resistance... it suddenly starts looking like quite a bit.
Any of the major storage vendors will be happy to sell you a WORM storage array that prevents tampering and has remote replication.
http://www.emc-centera.com/more-about-emc-centera.htm
https://communities.netapp.com/community/products_and_solutions/netapp_integrated_data_protection/blog/2011/12/19/netapp-snaplock-where-compliance-and-efficiency-meet
Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?
A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep. It should at a minimum be on a RAID array that does automatic scrubbing for data errors, and is backed up offsite (either through tape or live replication).
But still, that shouldn't bring the cost beyond a few thousand dollars - which seems a small price to pay to keep a 5 year old case alive.
We (The United States) offer them the ability to keep their land and people under peace and not the premise of war. We (The United States) have the military strength to undermine another sovereign state's ability to maintain control of factories and production of said goods. This is what we offer to them and will do so until we cannot do so.
I wonder if that's true in modern times - if we declared war on China because we wanted control of their factories and suddenly lost access to Asian electronic component imports (even if other Asian countries remained friendly to the USA, China's military may prevent them from manufacturing or exporting any goods), would we be able to keep our war machine running? Do we have the capacity to make the semiconductors, resistors, capacitors, and build the circuit boards that we rely on for our "smart" military? Could that capacity be ramped up as quickly as we ramped up our industrial manufacturing capacity during WWII? A single chip fab can take billions of dollars and years to bring online - and probably relies on many foreign imports to make it run.
When I sent my dad a Linux computer because his old Windows machine was taken over by malware (no amount of remote help with running various cleanup tools helped), I set it up to automatically SSH to my home server every 5 minutes and open a tunnel back to his computer desktop's VNC port as well as an SSH port as a fallback.
it came in handy when I had mistyped his home wireless router's WPA key before sending the computer, I just had him plug the computer directly to one of his router's LAN ports, and then I was able to remote in and fix it.
Reading from a tablet is like reading with someone shining a flashlight into your eyes. Particularly at night a tablet, with its backlight, keeps you awake. An eink reader does not have that problem.
I have both a Kindle and Nook Color. While I do find the Kindle to be easier on the eyes for extended reading, I've never had the nook keep me up at night, and my partner said that the Nook is much less noticeable to her than the kindle plus book light (and she doesn't like it at all when I leave the bedside light on for reading).
So even though I prefer reading on the Kindle, in bed I usually stick to the Nook for reading after her bedtime (I'm running cyanogenmod on the Nook so I can run both the Nook and Kindle apps but I usually strip the DRM off of books after purchase so I can read them on either device natively).
I've read elsewhere that a backlight will keep you awake, but I still don't understand how a dimmed down backlight is any different to your eyes than a bedside light or clipon booklight that not only lights up the display to the same level as the backlight, but also most of the bedroom.
In general they are lighter as well making them easier to hold.
I barely notice the difference in weight between the Kindle and Nook Color, but I find a larger tablet to be heavy and unwieldy as a book substitute.
For people who want to consume from the web a tablet is the right choice. For those of us who want to read the eink readers are the right choice.
But for those that want to do both a tablet is the right choice since a tablet makes an adequate eBook reader, but an eInk reader is terrible at web browsing (though my experience is limited to my early edition Kindle so newer devices with a touch screen may be better at web browsing, even if limited to black and white)
Page turns - maybe these were older models, but it drove me crazy that every page turn required a blank of the screen followed by a redraw of the new page.
If you think that's bad, a friend once lent me an old fashioned book -- she said it was made out of "paper" (which she claimed is made out of dead trees! Yuck, I hope that's not true since I had my fingers all over it).
Every time I turned the page, there was a brief moment where I could see both the left half of the previous page and the right hand half of the next page! Who ever dreamed up that UI?! It was so confusing and annoying.
My Kindle briefly flashes the page to black during page turns which makes a lot more sense from a UI standpoint than mixing half the content of the previous and next pages together.
In all seriousness, I found this to be a complete non-issue a few pages into my first book -- now I never notice the flash.
I own a Kindle (and a Nook running cyanogenmod), but I still read most books on paper.
Not because I don't want to read them on the Kindle, but because a used book is often half (or less) the price of a used book including delivery. And I can still sell it for a buck or two when I'm done.
I read the occasional title from Baen or Smashwords, but I've bought only a handful of Kindle/Nook titles in the past 2 years.
As long as you don't care about reading new releases as soon as they are published, buying used is the way to go.
As an example, looking at a random book from a 2011 bestsellers list "The Tiger's Wife". Prices including delivery (assuming Amazon Prime free delivery):
New Hardcover: $10.50 (two day Amazon Prime delivery)
Used Hardcover: $6.57 (two day Amazon Prime delivery)
New Paperback: $10.20 (two day Amazon Prime delivery)
Used Paperback: $6.37 (standard shipping)
Kindle Edition: $11.99
Why pay more for the Kindle edition than it costs to buy and deliver a brand new book? About the only time I prefer an eBook is when I'm traveling and don't want to carry a heavy book(s) along with me.
Briefer summary of linked article:
Amazon and Azure use different API's, if you use one vendor's API, you're locked into that vendor. There might be libraries available that hide the vendor specific API's but that's outside the scope of the article.
The UK didn't say it was going to "storm" Ecuador's embassy. (The origin of that claim? None other than Ecuador.) What the UK said is that Ecuador's embassy may be stripped of its diplomatic status [guardian.co.uk] (a move which would have serious diplomatic fallout), and police may arrest Assange.
How do you think they are going to arrest him if they strip Ecuador's diplomatic status? Just knock on the door and politely ask him to come out? They could do that now if that's their plan. I think you only need to look at the FBI + New Zealand's military-style assault on Dot Com's mansion to see how the UK will extract Assange.
And another site that sells DRM-free eBooks: http://www.smashwords.com/
People looking for ebooks in places like Amazon often have trouble figuring out which ebooks have DRM and which don't because Amazon does not advertise that information.
How can they NOT make that information easily available?
Why do people not return books more as soon as they run into an unadvertised DRM problem?
Because when people who are not Slashdot readers buy a book at Amazon, and it works on their Kindle they are happy. Few ordinary users try to move eBooks between platforms, and if they do try and fail, they shrug their shoulders and stop trying.
But maybe this label will help make more people aware of what they are giving up when they buy DRM infected content. The music studious seem to have learned their lesson since most (all?) music is available unencumbered.
Why does it cost money to NOT publish my phone number?
Because they make money providing their customer lists to the people who publish phone directories, political organizations that request the list, telemarketers, etc.
Why does it cost money to renew my car registration online via an automated system instead of at a building that costs rent and overhead with a human employee?
Because the whole point of a car registration is to serve as an impediment to prevent any idiot from buying a car. Doesn't work very well, but can you imagine how bad it would be if people who couldn't scrape together $35 once a year were allowed to operate and maintain a car? It costs a lot more than $35/year to keep a car safe; oil changes alone will be at least twice that, let alone regular maintenance that isn't covered by warranty, like wheel alignments, new tires/balance, brake service, etc..... And do you really expect somebody who can't afford $35/year to be driving a new car that's under warranty?
I think you missed his point - he wasn't asking why you need to pay a registration fee (mine is closer to $300/year since it's based on the value of your car), but why you need to pay $3 extra to pay online when the cost to run the website is (presumably) cheaper to the DMV than accepting payment via a live person. While it's true that a website costs money to build and support, that must be much less than the cost to build, maintain, and staff a building.
Pretty sure they used a CDN or two to handle the traffic, and its possible the CDN uses a hybrid mode which works basically like combining a regular CDN server network with a p2p torrent network
Can you expand on what you mean by this, not many users have CDN client software installed to facilitate P2P..
I think he's talking about something like this:
http://www.akamai.com/client/
Is there some benefit to pubkey over simpler symmetric encryption systems, given that NASA was in a position to do a secure key exchange before the rover left?
With public key cryptography, you only need to keep the private key safe - the secret key never needs to leave the room in which it's generated and only the public key needs to leave the room. They can give the public key to anyone to load in the rover and load it months in advance, and even if someone can extract the public key from the rover's key store, it doesn't matter.
Additionally, If the private key is believed to be compromised, they can securely replace the public key on the rover key in-transit (assuming the attacker hasn't gotten there first) by sending a new firmware image that replaces the compromised key with a new public key. Even if an attacker is watching the stream and sees the new public key getting sent to the lander, he can't use that new public key to launch a new attack, he'd have to gain access to the new secret key.
In contrast, if an attacker compromises the secret key in symmetric key encryption, there's no way to replace it on the rover since the attacker can decrypt anything that's sent to the rover so if they send over a new encryption key, he can see it.
Most hacks would be stopped by public key cryptography, just sign the code with a secret key known only to a scientist (use a split key so it takes more than one person to sign a file), and then it's impossible to corrupt the image after it's been signed, and impossible to upload your own image even if you have your own transmitter (or can take over NASA's transmitter).
Of course, if your hackers break into the computers used to compile the new firmware image, then they can have all sorts of back doors that insert their nefarious code into the firmware, like maybe code to make the rover drive around to spell out "All your Mars base are belong to us" in the martian dust.
But I think any hacking group sophisticated enough to pull off that kind of hack is going to spend their time on more profitable pursuits since this kind of hack will likely not even make the news if NASA decides to cover it up, they may just say "Oops, system malfunction, we lost contact with the Rover, no further data will arrive from Mars." Then they send up a Roomba to vacuum up the evidence of the hack.
They'll survive because nobody with two brain cells to rub together enjoys reading on a backlit and always-refreshing screen.
Spoken by a person reading slashdot on a "backlit and always-refreshing screen".
There's a big difference between spending 30 minutes browsing the web and spending hours reading an eBook. I always use the eInk Kindle instead of my 7" android tablet for reading a book - it's just easier on my eyes. And while I can browse the web on the Kindle, it's not really the best platform for web browsing so I use the tablet (or my laptop) for that.
Google Mail? It might be good, but companies better check their contracts. Since the small companies usually don't have public stock, Sarbanes-Oxley may not be an issue, but with clients is may be. To boot, not all mail providers be able to furnish documentation of SOX compliance. Come audit time, you really want that stuff ready to go when the auditor is present and requesting documentation.
You would think that a company like Genentech with 11,000 employees would know a thing or two about whether or not their Google Apps email solution meets all of the regulatory requirements they are subject to.
Finally, who is the customer with Google Apps, the people using it... or the advertisers? Google might have a conflict of interest in that department. I'd rather stick with a mail provider paid for completely by the end user.
You seem to be confusing the free version of Google mail with the paid Google Apps for Business which defaults to not serving ads.
Zimbra may be good enough for a college student to get their latest Facebook confirmation E-mail, but in a professional environment, it is not up to the task. This isn't to say OWA is perfect, but there are a lot of business functions that are Exchange-only:
Zimbra has Outlook and mobile device integration, all secured by TLS/SSL
Connectors. Yes, these are nothing more than just TLS connections with known certificates, but a lot of companies feel better when their clients are able to have a dedicated, encrypted connection.
I don't even know what that means in the context of an email server? Are you talking about a persistant connection between Outlook and the email backend or a VPN?
In any case, Zimbra can do more than deliver Facebook status messages, they have a pretty broad customer list
Policies. Almost all devices work with Exchange, and fewer and fewer lie to it about capabilities. If a device went missing, triggering a remote erase will work regardless of which maker or OS is on the device. No other E-mail system has this in place.
Data at rest encryption. Exchange can pretty much guarantee that any device touching it either lies convincingly about encryption (like earlier Android versions), or actually implements it.
Zimbra has had remote wipe for years. Even Google Apps has remote wipe capability. And they can also enforce encryption and other ActiveSync security policies.
If one wants to play GSA contracts, this might be a major factor for state or Federal business.
Maybe Google doesn't know anything about the government sector.
Believe it or not, there is competition in the email server market, but most companies don't bother because once they buy the CALs and build a server infrastructure to run their other Microsoft applications, Exchange doesn't add much more to their Microsoft cost. But some companies are still finding it cost effective.
It seems weird that a patient can't get access to data about his own heart.
On the other hand... How much data do people w/o implanted devices have? Seems he's still in the same boat.
For $2000, I could have quite a bit of information about my own heart:
http://storkmedical.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Session_ID=dffb210245397c6228266362ec8a92df&Screen=PROD&Product_Code=CC-RESTING&Category_Code=EKG-Machines-PC-Based&gclid=COnzzJm24LECFWk0QgodlQMA3g
Or if I wanted to go cheap, for $400 I could have a wearable device:
http://www.facelake.net/ekg80a.html
But I still wouldn't know me what the defibrillator implanted in my chest sees.
There is good reason modern jet fighters have recumbent seating, and it's not just for G forces.
I inherited a power recliner and can spend many hours surfing in it with zero discomfort.
The most comfortable position for your body isn't necessarily the one that's best for your body.
Standing (or sit-stand) workstations are getting a lot of press as being better for your health:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/stand-up-while-you-read-this/
I love sitting on a Swiss Ball, aka Exerball or whatever. Otherwise, the Missionary Position (TM) is awesome.
And here's the computer mounting apparatus for use in the missionary position:
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0,3253,l%253D222445%2526a%253D222436%2526po%253D1,00.asp?p=n
2: Exchange. I'm sorry, but there is nothing else out there. You HAVE to have Exchange/Outlook because clients want dedicated send/receive connectors oftentimes (a lot of clients use homegrown root certs so a hacked CA in Elbonia can't cause E-mail to be divulged.) Exchange isn't great, but the rule of thumb is "you use Exchange in your business, or else you don't have a business."
You should open your eyes and look around if you think Exchange is the only mail/calendaring solution out there. I'm not sure why a hacked CA in Elbonia can cause email to be divulged but having my own CA will prevent that - is a small business owner really going to install his own trusted certs on every computer and device that accesses his exchange server, or is he just going to tell employees "Ignore certificate warnings when you check email since I'm using self-signed certs".
I moved a 500 person company to Zimbra with great success -- saved a significant amount of money on licensing and it was more reliable than their old Exchange server. Many enterprises have migrated to Google Apps - Genentech has 13,000 employees on that platform.
If I were starting a small business, I'd definitely use something like Google Apps for email and calendaring, plus it can handle just about all of the word processing and spreadsheets that a small business needs while letting employees have full access from home or work.
But for accounting software, I'd go with commercial software that my accountant is familiar with.
To protect against geo-scale catastrophies, keep a set at a remote relative's house, swapping in a newer backup each time you visit. I have relatives at 200 and 600 miles away, not really far enough for widespread catastrophes, but better than nothing. I bet you could think of some prospects.
What widespread catastrophe will span 200 or 600 miles (as long as they aren't both coastal cities subject to ocean borne threats like tsunami and hurricane)? Aside from large asteroid strike or Yellowstone super-volcano eruption in which case, keeping your photographs safe will probably be less important than keeping your family alive.