Who wants to spend lots of time building a Google Plus network and posting there regularly when Google has a habit of shutting down services with little warning?
At least you have some assurance that Facebook is not going to stop being Facebook, but Google could decide that Google Plus is not worth continuing and shut it down.
Um, the checksum is the binary's MD5 hash. It's not "stored" with the binary. The hashes are listed in that second link I provided, which is an SSL page. To verify the binary's integrity, run a md5 sum generator on the binary and compare the hash you get with the hash listed on the SSL page.
That would be more meaningful if the link to the MD5 checksums was not on the same non-SSL page as the link to the binaries, so is subject to manipulation -- an attacker can make it point anywhere they want, and unless a user "knows" that the checksum page is supposed to be SSL, they'd never know (yes, you gave the SSL page, but how do I know that you're not an attacker and that you gave me a fake page that you happened to upload to an Oracle server?). Likewise, if someone can alter the binary on the repo, who is to say that they can't alter the checksum file as well?
There's one well-established method to validate downloads, and that is to use a cryptographic signature (with a well protected private key, the signature should be generated on a completely offline computer.
MD5 verification may be "good enough" for most uses, but it's very weak authentication.
If they match, you got a good download. If they don't, then you got a bad download and you shouldn't install it. Geez, I can't believe this has to be explained on Slashdot.
You seem to be confusing download verification with authentication -- they are different concepts.
There's no bundleware like the Ask toolbar with the java installer from Oracle's website.
A simple checksum stored with the binary is not a means of authentication, it's only a means to validate that there was no file corruption on download (since an attacker can update the checksum(s) at the same time he modifies the binary). Something like a cryptographic signature would be needed for authentication (with a validated means of public key distribution)
Since the download link does not use SSL, even if you trust that no one has corrupted Oracle's repository, you have no assurance that the file you download hasn't been modified in-transit using a man-in-the-middle attack.
When I'm connected to my company's VPN connection, they route all of my traffic over that connection, sounds like this law is giving the feds carte blanche to hack all work-from-home users.
I for one am tired of the government from being slowed by locks whenever they need to find a terrorist suspect, I think the government needs a master key that can open any lock, and everyone combination lock needs to have a master unlock code to unlock it.
Since the master keys would only be available to a few thousand (ok, maybe a few hundred thousand) law enforcement personnel, I fail to see how the "bad guys" would ever get access to them. The government has our best interests at heart, and they carefully screen employees to ensure that none of them are the "bad guys".
No. The point is that peak usage has fallen dramatically because of time of day pricing - majority doesn't ignore price that is 3x large. But people still pay more year after year. Moreover, 'cheap' time is getting more expensive quicker than 'expensive' time. Probably because too many people started doing their laundry at night and energy companies want to recover their losses.
So all that 'smart' crap does is allows companies save on infrastructure (generating stations, pipes, wires, etc) - which is just bonus for the management in a short term. Like: key, we do not need to build this new power plant but still get same money from users - let's give ourselves huge bonuses.
At the same time average utilization of infrastructure grows. And this means that possibility 'statistical fluke' when too many people turn on their heating increases. And this means more outages. But with that smart crap that may say 'we are experiencing higher than normal load, so you'd better find another blanket'. And continue crank up prices.
Isn't that what I just said? Consumers may not be paying less overall with time of day pricing models, but regardless, they can't ignore time of day pricing or they will pay much more overall.
This article is about a technological solution to work within time-of-day pricing models, if your problem is that time-of-day pricing is just a way for utilities to charge more while reducing their costs, that's a political problem and you should bring it up with your regulators. (assuming that you're in a regulated electrical market)
Finally, something good can come out of the "war on terror" and it can be a good use of the NSA's resources -- they can track down and eliminate spammers to prevent terrorist attacks.
The way energy markets are organized makes sure that you will not 'save money' no matter what.
Those monopolies will want their money. Even if you burn no fuel - investment has been made. And less you use - longer they can be charging you.
Take 'smart meters' as example. At no point people getting smart meters were paying less. They were using less, and using at 'cheaper' time. But energy markets 'suddenly' rose to accommodate for that and make sure energy magnates get their bonuses.
Whether or not you really save money over not having such a system in place is open to debate, but once utilities move to time-of-day pricing models, then consumers that don't reduce usage during peak pricing periods *will* pay more. So you can't just ignore the pricing and expect that you won't end up paying more.
I don't want my furnace to turn itself off at 2 am while I'm sleeping and it's 20 below outside. If everyone is using electricity at the same time, it's for a reason.
But maybe you'd be willing to let the temperature in the house dip down to 65 degrees at 2am if it turned out there was a spike in pricing then... but it knows you want the temperature back up to 70 degrees by the time you wake up at 7am. The furnace is one appliance that has a lot of flexibility in exactly when it runs - most of the time you can shift its runtime by 15 minutes (or longer) without a noticeable difference in comfort, so you can take advantage of short-term power price fluctuations.
A naive setback thermostat might turn the heat on full-blast at 6:30am to warm the house by 7am, but a smarter thermostat that can look at power prices might warm the house back up to 70 degrees at 5:30am before the 6am peak pricing kicks in, saving you money.
Is jumping from one train to another really that much of a problem? As you say the big $ train will be delivering CalTrain like performance in SF anyhow. You do it to get to south Oakland (better to get _out_ of S Oakland) on BART for fucks sake.
Have you ever used public transit or trains? Changing trains *is* a big deal... for most of the same reasons people avoid connecting flights, I'll happily pay more money to avoid a flight connection.
First, it makes the trip longer (even if the connecting train is waiting and ready to go, the dwell time is limited by the slowest person to make the transfer, so figure at least 15 minutes for everyone to gather their luggage and move across the platform). But, and probably worse, it interupts whatever you're doing on the train, whether you're sleeping, working playing cards, whatever, you'll get an announcement 30 minutes before arrival to prepare to transfer so you wake up, get the family and luggage together, unplug your laptop, etc, then you carry everything to the new train and have to get all set up again with whatever you were doing (and if you were sleeping, you may not get back to sleep at all before you arrive in SF). And since Caltrain has no reserved seating, you may not be able to sit together with your party, and may not even get a seat at all and have to stand.
Transit connections suck, they are unavoidable in many cases, but convenient transit should not require them unnecessarily.
I think after SF exhausts 'it's share' (on endless environmental and NIMBY lawsuits) that's where it will end anyhow. Like I say, a payoff for support.
Caltrain needs to be modernized and electrified regardless of whether HSR travels on their tracks or not, so what different does it make if HSR trains travel along the tracks or not?
So even though they are not unplugged, they are either read-only or not mounted. Also data is available on two devices. So even if one explodes, the other is still there. No, I do not do offsite backup. If my house burns down, I have bigger issues then data.
Depends what that data is -- when my sister lost her house in a fire (even the fire safe melted, all that was left was the fireplace and half of the 1920's era cast iron stove), she lost a *lot* of irreplaceable photos that she had scanned in over the years. Hundreds of old family photos dating back nearly 100 years -- she had the originals carefully packed away for safe keeping. Fortunately, most of her more recent photos were also stored in online photo albums so those were saved.
She was smart enough to keep a photo record of the more expensive items in her house... also on her computer, so that was lost too, but at least she emailed the spreadsheet to herself (not as backup but so she could edit it while traveling).
Her "backup" for everything was keeping a copy of everying on her laptop computer, which was also in the house.
Of everything she lost in that fire, the photos are the things she misses most -- and those would have been trivial to keep safe through any cloud based backup service. (or her own offsite backup by shipping hard drives or DVD's, but that requires more discipline to keep current)
Airports must be built in the center of cities to get passengers.
Do you see how stupid that is?
HSR going into the cities is a payoff, pure and simple. After the cities burn through 'their share' of the money the plan will go back to existing routes.
Airports are fundamentally different than trains. When a plane takes 90 minutes for a trip and a train takes 4 hours, getting the train to where the people want to go (or start from) is what's going to get them to take the train. If you stop the train at the far end of existing transit lines and the trip takes 6 hours and requires making 2 connections, few would take it, especially when it only takes about 6 hours to drive.
The only way people will take transit is if it's more convenient than the alternative.
In principle I agree with you. But the original proposal required bulldozing substantial portions of downtowns on the peninsula to add the extra trackage. It proved politically untenable. The compromise was to stop short of San Francisco, but to _upgrade_ the existing CalTrain. This has been the impetus for CalTrain to fund electrification, and it's why CalTrain will be extended to run underground to the new TransBay Transit Center being built near 1st and Mission.
I believe the plan is to run HSR on the Caltrain tracks all the way to the new Transbay building, which does require electrifying and upgrading caltrain tracks (and tunnelling up to the Transbay Terminal).
I live in the Outer Richmind, and while I support HSR, what I really care about is not having to spent 45 minutes to an hour on the bus, *each* *way*, commuting to and from downtown. Theoretically I chose to live in the city so I didn't have to waste so much time commuting. (Until recently I lived close enough to downtown to walk to work.) The Geary Bus Rapid Transit project isn't schedule to begin service until 2019, and it's still going to be at least 30 minutes downtown. WTF!? Build a mother-fscking subway underneath Geary, already!
It takes the Muni Metro L line at least 15 minutes to travel underground from the Forest Hill station to downtown and that's not nearly as far as traveling from the outer Richmond, so even if they spent billions of dollars digging a light rail subway for the 38, you're still not going to see much better travel times than 30 minutes to get downtown.
BRT is the way to go, building a new subway is hugely expensive, and doesn't buy much over BRT -- and light rail bstops tend to be more spread out because the stations are so expensive, so you might trade in 5 minutes less travel time for 5 minutes of extra walk time to the station.
Personally, I think MUNI is dragging their feet because the 38-Geary probably makes MUNI a ton of money. It's the most crowded line in the city, and packed night and day. The 38 pays for MUNI to keep running all their smaller routes elsewhere around the city. From their perspective, why touch something that is working for them revenue wise, especially when it means diverting development funds?
I don't think Muni cares about saving a few billion ollars in (mostly grant funded) capital costs, but they likely can't afford to take on any work on a new subway line while they still build the new line to Chinatown, and Richmond residents like yourself probably don't want to wait a couple decades for a better transit methord, BRT is not only cheaper but it's much faster to build.
Besides, when BRT breaks down, you're not stuck in a dark tunnel with no where to go, at least you can get out of the bus.
It should end at the furthest spur of existing local rail (cal train or capital corridor amtrak for SF for example) and not run to city centers.
Why add an hour+ to HSR by stoping in Gilroy instead of downtown SF and make passengers transfer to already crowded commuter trains? Unless your goal is to kill HSR, that seems unreasonable -- people don't want to transfer among 3 modes of transit (which is inconvenient and adds unnecessary time).
I'd be a lot less likely to take HSR if I had to fight commute hours loads on Caltrain with my 2 suitcases.
Politics make that impossible. Billions must be spent running HSR (at low speeds) into the centers of cities to get votes.
HSR must be run in the center of cities to get passengers.
Quick! Tell California to stop the groundbreaking on their $60B high speed rail boondoggle which is only $10B funded right now. Don't get me wrong, I support the idea of high-speed rail, but this project is "off the rails" and multiple studies have shown it will neither be economically viable nor a practical solution for its intended purpose of getting people off the highways (mostly because of the complete lack of the all-important "last mile" solution in California).
I thought it was supposed to compete with airlines where the "last 20 mile" problem has already been solved -- the HSR is even better in that it can go closer to downtown areas.
I'd be more likely to take the train to LA rather than fly if it really makes the trip in less then 4 hours. It takes me 30 minutes to get to the airport (an hour early to make sure I can get through security), then 90 minutes to make the flight (add 30 minutes if I checked a bag), then an hour to get to my destination from the aiport (only about 10 minutes from one of the proposed stations).
As it is now, I usually drive since the gas costs less than the plane ticket, and even though it's couple hours longer to drive, I have the convenience of having my car when I get there... and I can leave when I want to, I don't have to leave my aunt's birthday party early to catch a flight -- which would also be the case if there were frequent train services, a 1000 passenger train doesn't sell out as quickly as a 200 passenger airplane.
Has Radio Shack made any efforts to remake themselves? I mean, I remember when they had a purpose of selling hard to find cables, electronic parts, kits, and electronics. Now all I see mostly in a Radio Shack is phones. One of the most competitive and low margin markets you can sell. On top of that they don't even sell a lot of the niche stuff they can make money on in store. You know have to order it online and many times these items are a must have today, not a week from now. Their cable line up went from practical, to selling Gold plated china crap, I bought two patch RCA cables a while back that did not even have soldered connections! Yea, Gold plated but come on Radio Shack they had so much resistance it wasn't even funny. Oh, I could go on about old batteries, terrible China made products, and horrible help that can sell a phone and that's about it. Radio Shack needs more then a bankruptcy they simply need to close up shop.
They were trying to ride the Maker wave, they advertise pretty heavily in Make magazine, and had a sizeable booth at the last Maker Faire I went to, but their in-store selection seems too limiting to really be successful -- for $100 on eBay I can order component kits that cover 99% of what I can find in Radio Shack's inventory.
Answer to #1: pfSense (http://www.pfsense.org/) Answer to #2: pfSense (http://forum.pfsense.org/)
See, wasn't that easy?
Even though pfSense can act as a Samba server, I'd put the firewall and Samba server on separate hardware. The Alix or APU from PC Engines board makes a nice low power firewall.
It seems weird that you can't upgrade if you delay. Really weird.
Agreed, it's weird, but I guess their OTA update process assumes that everyone will update to each version, so it can't handle the (apparently rare?) case where a user skips an update. No matter how many times I click the "Check for Update" button on the System Updates screen, my phone says "Your system is up to date."
It would be cheaper to just print 7 times on 7 different printers. All seven ok? Sounds good, go with it.
Whatever happened to the idea of voting logic?
How do you accurately compare 7 different 3D models that may differ only in some small detail out of thousands of small details. Scan them all in a 3D scanner? If you're going to do that, then why not only print one and scan it for accuracy?
And the 3D printer will have to be FDA approved and cost well over 22 million dollars.
Not quite... Since it's not actually PART of the imager itself, it needn't be FDA approved. However, if it were.... yes. We had a generic hard drive fail on our CT. Just a typicall 400 GB SATA drive. We had literally dozens of them hanging around but we couldn't use it because they were not special FDA approved generic SATA hard drives. No special firmware needed - the console for the CT runs a GE version of Linux (you can see this as it boots). All the drive did was hold the images temporarily. It couldn't kill the patient unless you threw it at them. But we had to shut the machine down for 48 hours until they could FexEx a drive to Anchorage and commercial jet it in.
So, we'd probably only charge $2000 for the gizmo (the specialist time would be included since they are not a doctor - you can only add special charges for doctors).
See, you feel better already.
If physicians are using the 3D printed model to plan their surgery, how could it not require approval? If the printer sometimes misprints by a mm that could make the difference between a successful surgery and accidentally severing an important nerve, so it seems that the manufacturer would need to test and certify a printer to ensure that it creates accurate models, otherwise they have no assurance that whatever cheap 3D printer the hospital buys at Walmart prints accurately with their software.
The FDA regulates computer monitors used to view medical imaging, so I don't see why they wouldn't regulate 3D printers used to "print" that same imaging data.
Since you're looking at Qt and GTK, I assume that you're writing a local GUI client, not a web app, so what operating system are your users running? Chances are that they are not already running Linux. Unless your product is some sort of turn-key system where you supply the hardware and software, then you ought to stick with whatever operating system your users already have in their offices -- which is probably Windows, possibly OSX, but they almost certainly do not run Linux on the desktop. (yes you can run Qt or GTK on Windows, but why bother?)
Have you thought about hiring a programmer to do this stuff? It's probably going to save you a lot of time and hassle to go this route than actually doing it yourself.
By using libraries and tools to do the nitty gritty work, he's essentially paying a team of programmers to do this stuff (and likely paying a fraction of the price he'd pay if he did it himself)... or, if he goes the open source route, he may be getting the output of that team of developers for free. If he has to write everything himself (even if he hires another developer to do it), he's committed to supporting that work himself forever, no one is going to port it to a new platform for him, no one is going to issue security patches for him, and his own customers are going to be the only ones that discover bugs in the code since no one else is using it.
Slashdot Mirror
Who wants to spend lots of time building a Google Plus network and posting there regularly when Google has a habit of shutting down services with little warning?
At least you have some assurance that Facebook is not going to stop being Facebook, but Google could decide that Google Plus is not worth continuing and shut it down.
Maybe you do not understand it because you are dumb? Try: plus.goog
le.com
If you're going to be snarky, be snarky about the right thing -- the GooglePlus.com URL does take you to your Google Plus home page.
The Windows installer is cryptographically signed by Oracle. Don't know about the others.
That sounds promising, though I don't see a signature in the rpm download, just sha1/md5 checksums.
Um, the checksum is the binary's MD5 hash. It's not "stored" with the binary. The hashes are listed in that second link I provided, which is an SSL page. To verify the binary's integrity, run a md5 sum generator on the binary and compare the hash you get with the hash listed on the SSL page.
That would be more meaningful if the link to the MD5 checksums was not on the same non-SSL page as the link to the binaries, so is subject to manipulation -- an attacker can make it point anywhere they want, and unless a user "knows" that the checksum page is supposed to be SSL, they'd never know (yes, you gave the SSL page, but how do I know that you're not an attacker and that you gave me a fake page that you happened to upload to an Oracle server?). Likewise, if someone can alter the binary on the repo, who is to say that they can't alter the checksum file as well?
There's one well-established method to validate downloads, and that is to use a cryptographic signature (with a well protected private key, the signature should be generated on a completely offline computer.
MD5 verification may be "good enough" for most uses, but it's very weak authentication.
If they match, you got a good download. If they don't, then you got a bad download and you shouldn't install it.
Geez, I can't believe this has to be explained on Slashdot.
You seem to be confusing download verification with authentication -- they are different concepts.
For Standard Edition JDK or JRE:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html
click which package you want to download, and then on the download page click the checksum link
https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/s/digest/8u31checksum.html
There's no bundleware like the Ask toolbar with the java installer from Oracle's website.
A simple checksum stored with the binary is not a means of authentication, it's only a means to validate that there was no file corruption on download (since an attacker can update the checksum(s) at the same time he modifies the binary). Something like a cryptographic signature would be needed for authentication (with a validated means of public key distribution)
Since the download link does not use SSL, even if you trust that no one has corrupted Oracle's repository, you have no assurance that the file you download hasn't been modified in-transit using a man-in-the-middle attack.
When I'm connected to my company's VPN connection, they route all of my traffic over that connection, sounds like this law is giving the feds carte blanche to hack all work-from-home users.
Couldn't you just weigh them?
I just weighed them, here's the weights: 356g, 355g, 357g, 354g, 355g, 358g, 354g.
Tell me which one has all of the critical nerves and blood vessels in the right place.
I for one am tired of the government from being slowed by locks whenever they need to find a terrorist suspect, I think the government needs a master key that can open any lock, and everyone combination lock needs to have a master unlock code to unlock it.
Since the master keys would only be available to a few thousand (ok, maybe a few hundred thousand) law enforcement personnel, I fail to see how the "bad guys" would ever get access to them. The government has our best interests at heart, and they carefully screen employees to ensure that none of them are the "bad guys".
No.
The point is that peak usage has fallen dramatically because of time of day pricing - majority doesn't ignore price that is 3x large.
But people still pay more year after year. Moreover, 'cheap' time is getting more expensive quicker than 'expensive' time. Probably because too many people started doing their laundry at night and energy companies want to recover their losses.
So all that 'smart' crap does is allows companies save on infrastructure (generating stations, pipes, wires, etc) - which is just bonus for the management in a short term. Like: key, we do not need to build this new power plant but still get same money from users - let's give ourselves huge bonuses.
At the same time average utilization of infrastructure grows. And this means that possibility 'statistical fluke' when too many people turn on their heating increases. And this means more outages. But with that smart crap that may say 'we are experiencing higher than normal load, so you'd better find another blanket'. And continue crank up prices.
Isn't that what I just said? Consumers may not be paying less overall with time of day pricing models, but regardless, they can't ignore time of day pricing or they will pay much more overall.
This article is about a technological solution to work within time-of-day pricing models, if your problem is that time-of-day pricing is just a way for utilities to charge more while reducing their costs, that's a political problem and you should bring it up with your regulators. (assuming that you're in a regulated electrical market)
Finally, something good can come out of the "war on terror" and it can be a good use of the NSA's resources -- they can track down and eliminate spammers to prevent terrorist attacks.
The way energy markets are organized makes sure that you will not 'save money' no matter what.
Those monopolies will want their money. Even if you burn no fuel - investment has been made. And less you use - longer they can be charging you.
Take 'smart meters' as example. At no point people getting smart meters were paying less. They were using less, and using at 'cheaper' time. But energy markets 'suddenly' rose to accommodate for that and make sure energy magnates get their bonuses.
Whether or not you really save money over not having such a system in place is open to debate, but once utilities move to time-of-day pricing models, then consumers that don't reduce usage during peak pricing periods *will* pay more. So you can't just ignore the pricing and expect that you won't end up paying more.
I don't want my furnace to turn itself off at 2 am while I'm sleeping and it's 20 below outside. If everyone is using electricity at the same time, it's for a reason.
But maybe you'd be willing to let the temperature in the house dip down to 65 degrees at 2am if it turned out there was a spike in pricing then... but it knows you want the temperature back up to 70 degrees by the time you wake up at 7am. The furnace is one appliance that has a lot of flexibility in exactly when it runs - most of the time you can shift its runtime by 15 minutes (or longer) without a noticeable difference in comfort, so you can take advantage of short-term power price fluctuations.
A naive setback thermostat might turn the heat on full-blast at 6:30am to warm the house by 7am, but a smarter thermostat that can look at power prices might warm the house back up to 70 degrees at 5:30am before the 6am peak pricing kicks in, saving you money.
Is jumping from one train to another really that much of a problem? As you say the big $ train will be delivering CalTrain like performance in SF anyhow. You do it to get to south Oakland (better to get _out_ of S Oakland) on BART for fucks sake.
Have you ever used public transit or trains? Changing trains *is* a big deal... for most of the same reasons people avoid connecting flights, I'll happily pay more money to avoid a flight connection.
First, it makes the trip longer (even if the connecting train is waiting and ready to go, the dwell time is limited by the slowest person to make the transfer, so figure at least 15 minutes for everyone to gather their luggage and move across the platform). But, and probably worse, it interupts whatever you're doing on the train, whether you're sleeping, working playing cards, whatever, you'll get an announcement 30 minutes before arrival to prepare to transfer so you wake up, get the family and luggage together, unplug your laptop, etc, then you carry everything to the new train and have to get all set up again with whatever you were doing (and if you were sleeping, you may not get back to sleep at all before you arrive in SF). And since Caltrain has no reserved seating, you may not be able to sit together with your party, and may not even get a seat at all and have to stand.
Transit connections suck, they are unavoidable in many cases, but convenient transit should not require them unnecessarily.
I think after SF exhausts 'it's share' (on endless environmental and NIMBY lawsuits) that's where it will end anyhow. Like I say, a payoff for support.
Caltrain needs to be modernized and electrified regardless of whether HSR travels on their tracks or not, so what different does it make if HSR trains travel along the tracks or not?
So even though they are not unplugged, they are either read-only or not mounted. Also data is available on two devices. So even if one explodes, the other is still there. No, I do not do offsite backup. If my house burns down, I have bigger issues then data.
Depends what that data is -- when my sister lost her house in a fire (even the fire safe melted, all that was left was the fireplace and half of the 1920's era cast iron stove), she lost a *lot* of irreplaceable photos that she had scanned in over the years. Hundreds of old family photos dating back nearly 100 years -- she had the originals carefully packed away for safe keeping. Fortunately, most of her more recent photos were also stored in online photo albums so those were saved.
She was smart enough to keep a photo record of the more expensive items in her house... also on her computer, so that was lost too, but at least she emailed the spreadsheet to herself (not as backup but so she could edit it while traveling).
Her "backup" for everything was keeping a copy of everying on her laptop computer, which was also in the house.
Of everything she lost in that fire, the photos are the things she misses most -- and those would have been trivial to keep safe through any cloud based backup service. (or her own offsite backup by shipping hard drives or DVD's, but that requires more discipline to keep current)
Airports must be built in the center of cities to get passengers.
Do you see how stupid that is?
HSR going into the cities is a payoff, pure and simple. After the cities burn through 'their share' of the money the plan will go back to existing routes.
Airports are fundamentally different than trains. When a plane takes 90 minutes for a trip and a train takes 4 hours, getting the train to where the people want to go (or start from) is what's going to get them to take the train. If you stop the train at the far end of existing transit lines and the trip takes 6 hours and requires making 2 connections, few would take it, especially when it only takes about 6 hours to drive.
The only way people will take transit is if it's more convenient than the alternative.
In principle I agree with you. But the original proposal required bulldozing substantial portions of downtowns on the peninsula to add the extra trackage. It proved politically untenable. The compromise was to stop short of San Francisco, but to _upgrade_ the existing CalTrain. This has been the impetus for CalTrain to fund electrification, and it's why CalTrain will be extended to run underground to the new TransBay Transit Center being built near 1st and Mission.
I believe the plan is to run HSR on the Caltrain tracks all the way to the new Transbay building, which does require electrifying and upgrading caltrain tracks (and tunnelling up to the Transbay Terminal).
I live in the Outer Richmind, and while I support HSR, what I really care about is not having to spent 45 minutes to an hour on the bus, *each* *way*, commuting to and from downtown. Theoretically I chose to live in the city so I didn't have to waste so much time commuting. (Until recently I lived close enough to downtown to walk to work.) The Geary Bus Rapid Transit project isn't schedule to begin service until 2019, and it's still going to be at least 30 minutes downtown. WTF!? Build a mother-fscking subway underneath Geary, already!
It takes the Muni Metro L line at least 15 minutes to travel underground from the Forest Hill station to downtown and that's not nearly as far as traveling from the outer Richmond, so even if they spent billions of dollars digging a light rail subway for the 38, you're still not going to see much better travel times than 30 minutes to get downtown.
BRT is the way to go, building a new subway is hugely expensive, and doesn't buy much over BRT -- and light rail bstops tend to be more spread out because the stations are so expensive, so you might trade in 5 minutes less travel time for 5 minutes of extra walk time to the station.
Personally, I think MUNI is dragging their feet because the 38-Geary probably makes MUNI a ton of money. It's the most crowded line in the city, and packed night and day. The 38 pays for MUNI to keep running all their smaller routes elsewhere around the city. From their perspective, why touch something that is working for them revenue wise, especially when it means diverting development funds?
I don't think Muni cares about saving a few billion ollars in (mostly grant funded) capital costs, but they likely can't afford to take on any work on a new subway line while they still build the new line to Chinatown, and Richmond residents like yourself probably don't want to wait a couple decades for a better transit methord, BRT is not only cheaper but it's much faster to build.
Besides, when BRT breaks down, you're not stuck in a dark tunnel with no where to go, at least you can get out of the bus.
It should end at the furthest spur of existing local rail (cal train or capital corridor amtrak for SF for example) and not run to city centers.
Why add an hour+ to HSR by stoping in Gilroy instead of downtown SF and make passengers transfer to already crowded commuter trains? Unless your goal is to kill HSR, that seems unreasonable -- people don't want to transfer among 3 modes of transit (which is inconvenient and adds unnecessary time).
I'd be a lot less likely to take HSR if I had to fight commute hours loads on Caltrain with my 2 suitcases.
Politics make that impossible. Billions must be spent running HSR (at low speeds) into the centers of cities to get votes.
HSR must be run in the center of cities to get passengers.
Quick! Tell California to stop the groundbreaking on their $60B high speed rail boondoggle which is only $10B funded right now.
Don't get me wrong, I support the idea of high-speed rail, but this project is "off the rails" and multiple studies have shown it will neither be economically viable nor a practical solution for its intended purpose of getting people off the highways (mostly because of the complete lack of the all-important "last mile" solution in California).
I thought it was supposed to compete with airlines where the "last 20 mile" problem has already been solved -- the HSR is even better in that it can go closer to downtown areas.
I'd be more likely to take the train to LA rather than fly if it really makes the trip in less then 4 hours. It takes me 30 minutes to get to the airport (an hour early to make sure I can get through security), then 90 minutes to make the flight (add 30 minutes if I checked a bag), then an hour to get to my destination from the aiport (only about 10 minutes from one of the proposed stations).
As it is now, I usually drive since the gas costs less than the plane ticket, and even though it's couple hours longer to drive, I have the convenience of having my car when I get there... and I can leave when I want to, I don't have to leave my aunt's birthday party early to catch a flight -- which would also be the case if there were frequent train services, a 1000 passenger train doesn't sell out as quickly as a 200 passenger airplane.
Has Radio Shack made any efforts to remake themselves? I mean, I remember when they had a purpose of selling hard to find cables, electronic parts, kits, and
electronics. Now all I see mostly in a Radio Shack is phones. One of the most competitive and low margin markets you can sell. On top of that they don't even sell a lot of the niche stuff they can make money on in store. You know have to order it online and many times these items are a must have today, not a week from now. Their cable line up went from practical, to selling Gold plated china crap, I bought two patch RCA cables a while back that did not even have soldered connections! Yea, Gold plated but come on Radio Shack they had so much resistance it wasn't even funny. Oh, I could go on about old batteries, terrible China made products, and horrible help that can sell a phone and that's about it. Radio Shack needs more then a bankruptcy they simply need to close up shop.
They were trying to ride the Maker wave, they advertise pretty heavily in Make magazine, and had a sizeable booth at the last Maker Faire I went to, but their in-store selection seems too limiting to really be successful -- for $100 on eBay I can order component kits that cover 99% of what I can find in Radio Shack's inventory.
Answer to #1: pfSense (http://www.pfsense.org/)
Answer to #2: pfSense (http://forum.pfsense.org/)
See, wasn't that easy?
Even though pfSense can act as a Samba server, I'd put the firewall and Samba server on separate hardware. The Alix or APU from PC Engines board makes a nice low power firewall.
It seems weird that you can't upgrade if you delay. Really weird.
Agreed, it's weird, but I guess their OTA update process assumes that everyone will update to each version, so it can't handle the (apparently rare?) case where a user skips an update. No matter how many times I click the "Check for Update" button on the System Updates screen, my phone says "Your system is up to date."
It would be cheaper to just print 7 times on 7 different printers. All seven ok? Sounds good, go with it.
Whatever happened to the idea of voting logic?
How do you accurately compare 7 different 3D models that may differ only in some small detail out of thousands of small details. Scan them all in a 3D scanner? If you're going to do that, then why not only print one and scan it for accuracy?
And the 3D printer will have to be FDA approved and cost well over 22 million dollars.
Not quite... Since it's not actually PART of the imager itself, it needn't be FDA approved. However, if it were .... yes. We had a generic hard drive fail on our CT. Just a typicall 400 GB SATA drive. We had literally dozens of them hanging around but we couldn't use it because they were not special FDA approved generic SATA hard drives. No special firmware needed - the console for the CT runs a GE version of Linux (you can see this as it boots). All the drive did was hold the images temporarily. It couldn't kill the patient unless you threw it at them. But we had to shut the machine down for 48 hours until they could FexEx a drive to Anchorage and commercial jet it in.
So, we'd probably only charge $2000 for the gizmo (the specialist time would be included since they are not a doctor - you can only add special charges for doctors).
See, you feel better already.
If physicians are using the 3D printed model to plan their surgery, how could it not require approval? If the printer sometimes misprints by a mm that could make the difference between a successful surgery and accidentally severing an important nerve, so it seems that the manufacturer would need to test and certify a printer to ensure that it creates accurate models, otherwise they have no assurance that whatever cheap 3D printer the hospital buys at Walmart prints accurately with their software.
The FDA regulates computer monitors used to view medical imaging, so I don't see why they wouldn't regulate 3D printers used to "print" that same imaging data.
Since you're looking at Qt and GTK, I assume that you're writing a local GUI client, not a web app, so what operating system are your users running? Chances are that they are not already running Linux. Unless your product is some sort of turn-key system where you supply the hardware and software, then you ought to stick with whatever operating system your users already have in their offices -- which is probably Windows, possibly OSX, but they almost certainly do not run Linux on the desktop. (yes you can run Qt or GTK on Windows, but why bother?)
Have you thought about hiring a programmer to do this stuff? It's probably going to save you a lot of time and hassle to go this route than actually doing it yourself.
By using libraries and tools to do the nitty gritty work, he's essentially paying a team of programmers to do this stuff (and likely paying a fraction of the price he'd pay if he did it himself)... or, if he goes the open source route, he may be getting the output of that team of developers for free. If he has to write everything himself (even if he hires another developer to do it), he's committed to supporting that work himself forever, no one is going to port it to a new platform for him, no one is going to issue security patches for him, and his own customers are going to be the only ones that discover bugs in the code since no one else is using it.