I can already hook up a gadget to my cable box analog outputs and stream that video anywhere in standard definition (high definition in many cases). And this stream doesn't stop at my home boundary. An additional device lets me control the channel the cable box selects. All this is without any hacking on the box whatsoever. The only way Comcast can stop this is to make the box shut off all analog outputs, or disconnect my cable. Are they going to disconnect everyone that does this?
But I'm not talking to Comcast (they might care, but that's not the issue right here). Instead, I'm talking to Scripps Networks Interactive, which has now shown itself to be an utterly clueless company (well, given that it is old money, that was kind of a given, anyway). SNI needs to understand that Cablevision is actually doing them a good thing.
By Cablevision making this app, most people won't be forced to use the "dark" side of the internet and grab tools that let them take their viewing habits anywhere. OTOH, what is that a bad thing for an ad sponsored network? Oh, something about Nielsen? Get over it. Oh, you wanted to shaft the public for extra shill to be mobile? That's just mechanism... you only deserved to be paid for viewed content, no more. Technology enables the masses more than it does the corporation. Learn to work within the new business models, or perish in chapter 11.
Heavier vehicles cause more damage to the road. So they should be taxed more. Just taxing it by the gas consumed may not be perfect, but it is close, and it avoids the added costs of new devices, the issues with retrofitting them on older cars, maintaining and calibrating all these devices, and making sure people don't break them or hack them (not something I have any confidence in business or government to every get right).
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It ain't broke. Want more money? Just jack the existing gasoline rates up.
The specific issue at hand is just about how much evidence is needed to invalidate a patent. The particulars of patent 5,787,449 are not what it before the Supreme court right now. The decision on this matter would then determine the course of the original patent case.
I had no trouble getting it, so it must be something on your end. Maybe you are at work and your employer is blocking stormdriver.com? If so, maybe they should be blocking slashdot.org, too.
This action has nothing to do with capitalism. This is just greed.
Capitalism is a method of allowing private or public investment in business, for the investor to gain returns if the company is successful.
An ethical business will create value and keep as a profit some portion of the value, with its customers acquiring the remaining value in the form of that product or service.
An unethical business with divert value instead of creating it, so they profit from something that harms everyone else.
Communism is nothing more than government substituted for the company in these roles. A government can be just as ethical or unethical (the latter usually in the form of corruption by leaders).
What is needed is a means to ensure ethical behavior, regardless of whether capitalism or communism is involved. Since governments tend to be inefficient, poorly organized, and heavily burdened by bureaucracy, and corporations tend to lie, steal, and cheat everywhere they can get away with, the ideal solution is for a well regulated form of capitalism.
Let your front ends do the HTTPS part. You just run front ends on CPUs with more cores. They decrypt, they see the URI, they check for a cache hit. If miss, pick a back-end server and go there. Your back-ends won't need to do the crypto, so they can just work on the site dynamics.
Generate all URL references as HTTPS. Relative references on the same server will do that automatically. That way there is no accessory content that is unencrypted. If you have ads, either make sure your ad provider supports HTTPS, or host the ads yourself (a bit harder for ad blocking this way).
If a connection comes in on the HTTP port, do a redirect to the main page as HTTPS and log the referrer URL if there is one. If it was just someone typing the domain name, they'll end up in the right place this way.
Urgency will be ranked based on which web sites will pay them more for preferential routing and bandwidth. Your cheap non-urgent data will be as slow as a dialup modem.
Under the new interpretation, principals and their schools are legally liable if they fail to curb “harassment” of students, even if it takes place outside the school, on Facebook or in private conversation among a few youths.
So now the schools become liable for stuff happening outside of school. While this is certainly bad stuff and kids need some "re-education" if they are doing it, this is pushing into a dangerous slippery slope, expecting the schools to be proxy parents 24x7, and follow them everywhere. Next thing you know, your principle might be sued or go to jail just because you fail to RTFA.
Proper partition alignment has been a long term issue that was ignored for at least a decade. Now that it is happening, the common alignment (1M, 2048 legacy sectors) might now need to change (2M, 4096 legacy sectors). In a few years, people might even get over the loss of another 2M of dirt cheap disk space (don't forget that we're all going to GPT which has another partition table at the end of the drive).
Even today, cheap (that's most of them) CD players still have jitter issues. Each block (1/75th of a second) can be shifted off one direction or the other by up to 7 time samples (up to 1/6300 second). It is hard to hear that, and it doesn't happen that often, nor in a consistent way. There is some computer software designed to detect and correct this (by re-reading until it has all the data bits, then aligns them correctly) for ripping purposes. So you can actually get better than "CD quality" via ripping (where "CD quality" is defined as tolerating these little bits of jitter).
Some people prefer 24 bit (instead of 16 bit) at 192 kHz (instead of 44.1 kHz). Personally, I like 32 bit and 960 kHz (it also happens to have an exact number of samples per video frame for every TV/video standard in the world that is used for media purposes).
Remember the TV repairman (if you are old enough)? A dying (well, by now probably completely dead) breed. When the TV went on the fritz, he (or she in a rare few cases) would diagnose the problem and apply a fix. Usually it was just a tube that needed replacement, but sometimes a capacitor. Occasionally something would have burned out like a resistor. As transistor TVs came along, the failures went down, but not to zero. Transistors could die, too, and were harder to replace. And they were more susceptible to lightning surges from the antenna (something that back then got TV signals for free).
Now days, if a TV goes bad, we just junk the whole thing and get a new one. If it was in warranty, we might get the new one for free. Too often it would die just 3 days after the warranty expired.
Just 3 years ago I had a relatively new TV (a digital one, with a VGA input, too) go bad. I could tell it was the power supply delivering unstable or low voltages after it warmed up. Fortunately, it was in warranty. So it was shipped to the manufacturer. About a week later a box comes back with a replacement. This was not the one I sent in, though it was the same model. At least it worked (and has been ever since). But I still wonder if someone replaced the power supply in the one I sent in. And I wonder if someone replaced the component inside that power supply that caused it to fail or if they scrapped the whole thing.
So why should failing software be any different? As a system administrator myself, I do like to at least find out what failed. But being practical, I also quota the time I spend on "failure forensics". If I can't figure it out in a few minutes for first time problems, I just reboot. If the problem happens again, then I justify more effort. If it never happens again, I never even think about it, anymore. While I love a good diagnostic challenge, it just don't make business sense to put much effort into that (unless its something we design and manufacture).
If you encrypt the entire drive, the SSD firmware will have no idea which sectors are no longer referenced and can be deleted. You won't get the performance advantage of the SSD's speculative pre-erase. And if by chance your encryption gets exposed, it will not have overwritten those sensitive sectors in files you deleted that haven't yet been re-allocated to another file. But you'll probably be a little safer overall.
The OS isn't writing to the cells directly. It's writing to a presented logical drive just above the wear-leveling layer. With this layer also doing speculative cleaning of sectors (what the OS writes) and their underlying cells based NOT on what is discarded by having written over it (where the wear leveling would write the new data on different cells, making the old cells now available... and suitable for pre-erasing when the SSD is not busy)... but discarded by the design of the filesystem referencing structures, then the firmware needs to know something about the filesystem to know when these discards happen. So my big question is which filesystem types do these firmwares understand? Is this just filesystems invented in Redmond? Or does it also include filesystems that are readily available without royalty costs?
Oh, and where can I find a utility for Linux/BSD that will execute a TRIM operation on the entire drive to effectively reset its mapping state (but without losing any important wear stats)?
... management is greatly to blame on this. If they truly respected people with STEM skills, they would start paying them what they are worth, as well as giving them freedom to innovate, come up with ideas, and solve problems. A few companies already do this. More need to. Good jobs for people with STEM skills are lacking.
And yes, there is also a shortage of people with STEM skills, too. These problems are a vicious cycle. When there are fewer jobs, with less pay, and less opportunity to do great things, many people will find somewhere else to go.
Supposedly executive management has MBA skills. They should understand concepts like supply and demand. What they are trying to do is use supply and demand to cut costs. Increasing the supply by opening up access to more people in other countries does cut costs. But it also triggers the feedback mechanism, which is a slow and pervasive one due to the time frames involved in the long career incentive to education to employment cycle. That feedback mechanism reduces the supply to match the demand.
Supply and demand is elastic. But they probably learned this only in product marketing terms, where the elasticity is measured only in a year or two. The career incentive, education, and employment cycle is longer, from ten to twenty years or more, depending on where the career incentive phase is looking is getting feedback from the employment phase (e.g. seeing 40 year old engineers being mothballed and out of work makes this elasticity cycle even longer).
If management wants Americans with STEM skills, as opposed to just any Earthling with STEM skills, then they need make it happen. I suspect the reality is, they just don't care. They made their bed. They can sleep in it.
Even if it does explode with the full brightness of our sun, it won't look anything like those scenes from Tatooine. Instead of having all that light spread over a disk as wide as our sun, it will all be concentrated from what appears to us as a single point. Instead of looking like another sun, it will look more like an extremely intense electric arc. It will be even more damaging to the eye to look at it, compared to looking at the sun, because more energy is concentrated into a single point instead of a small area.
But, if, as suggested, it has merely the energy level of the moon here, since it would still be concentrated into a single point, it will still be dangerous to look at, even if it only provides a minimal amount of working light to walk around outside at night with. And that all depends on whether Orion will be in the night sky when the big event happens, or not. You might want to check the star charts for December 2012 and January 2013, if you think that's the big day.
What it comes down to is they will be adding an AAAA record to their DNS. A great many systems, including Ubuntu, will lookup AAAA records first if the resolver detects that IPv6 is enabled. Unfortunately, the way Ubuntu should to set this to be the default, there is no way to change it without a patch. That's because the only preference feature for configuration allows choosing to prefer IPv6, but not IPv4. The source defaults to preferring to IPv4, so you have a choice, unless you install the Ubuntu version. Anyway, IPv6 will be preferred if IPv6 is detected, which is probably based on there being an IPv6 address configured, possibly even the link local one every interface gets if the IPv6 stack is present. The AAAA record will be queried first. If the service has no AAAA record, a negative response is quick, and the A record is queried next. But if there is an AAAA record present, you'll get a valid answer, and the application will try to connect to it. If your network connectivity in IPv6 is not complete, you wait for it to timeout and give up retrying, before it falls back to trying IPv4.
It might be better if applications were to try IPv6 first, and try IPv4 maybe a second later, during the dual stack transition period, letting both connections be pending in parallel if there is a delay. The first to connect wins and the other socket gets closed. But I don't know how much of an impact all those extra connections will be when the IPv6 connection can't be completed within a second.
BTW, if you want to make IPv6 more popular, put more free stuff out there than is available on IPv4. Sell stuff with an IPv6 discount (6% off if you are connecting via IPv6, but 4% off if via IPv4).
Slashdot Mirror
And so begins the mass mailings from Epsilon's secret Chinese and Russian subsidiaries.
I can already hook up a gadget to my cable box analog outputs and stream that video anywhere in standard definition (high definition in many cases). And this stream doesn't stop at my home boundary. An additional device lets me control the channel the cable box selects. All this is without any hacking on the box whatsoever. The only way Comcast can stop this is to make the box shut off all analog outputs, or disconnect my cable. Are they going to disconnect everyone that does this?
But I'm not talking to Comcast (they might care, but that's not the issue right here). Instead, I'm talking to Scripps Networks Interactive, which has now shown itself to be an utterly clueless company (well, given that it is old money, that was kind of a given, anyway). SNI needs to understand that Cablevision is actually doing them a good thing.
By Cablevision making this app, most people won't be forced to use the "dark" side of the internet and grab tools that let them take their viewing habits anywhere. OTOH, what is that a bad thing for an ad sponsored network? Oh, something about Nielsen? Get over it. Oh, you wanted to shaft the public for extra shill to be mobile? That's just mechanism ... you only deserved to be paid for viewed content, no more. Technology enables the masses more than it does the corporation. Learn to work within the new business models, or perish in chapter 11.
Heavier vehicles cause more damage to the road. So they should be taxed more. Just taxing it by the gas consumed may not be perfect, but it is close, and it avoids the added costs of new devices, the issues with retrofitting them on older cars, maintaining and calibrating all these devices, and making sure people don't break them or hack them (not something I have any confidence in business or government to every get right).
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It ain't broke. Want more money? Just jack the existing gasoline rates up.
They can get away with this in Britain since they use funny electrical plugs.
Closer to $122 for 5 years
The specific issue at hand is just about how much evidence is needed to invalidate a patent. The particulars of patent 5,787,449 are not what it before the Supreme court right now. The decision on this matter would then determine the course of the original patent case.
I had no trouble getting it, so it must be something on your end. Maybe you are at work and your employer is blocking stormdriver.com? If so, maybe they should be blocking slashdot.org, too.
That said, you aren't missing anything.
This action has nothing to do with capitalism. This is just greed.
Capitalism is a method of allowing private or public investment in business, for the investor to gain returns if the company is successful.
An ethical business will create value and keep as a profit some portion of the value, with its customers acquiring the remaining value in the form of that product or service.
An unethical business with divert value instead of creating it, so they profit from something that harms everyone else.
Communism is nothing more than government substituted for the company in these roles. A government can be just as ethical or unethical (the latter usually in the form of corruption by leaders).
What is needed is a means to ensure ethical behavior, regardless of whether capitalism or communism is involved. Since governments tend to be inefficient, poorly organized, and heavily burdened by bureaucracy, and corporations tend to lie, steal, and cheat everywhere they can get away with, the ideal solution is for a well regulated form of capitalism.
Let your front ends do the HTTPS part. You just run front ends on CPUs with more cores. They decrypt, they see the URI, they check for a cache hit. If miss, pick a back-end server and go there. Your back-ends won't need to do the crypto, so they can just work on the site dynamics.
Generate all URL references as HTTPS. Relative references on the same server will do that automatically. That way there is no accessory content that is unencrypted. If you have ads, either make sure your ad provider supports HTTPS, or host the ads yourself (a bit harder for ad blocking this way).
If a connection comes in on the HTTP port, do a redirect to the main page as HTTPS and log the referrer URL if there is one. If it was just someone typing the domain name, they'll end up in the right place this way.
Urgency will be ranked based on which web sites will pay them more for preferential routing and bandwidth. Your cheap non-urgent data will be as slow as a dialup modem.
Then you missed:
Under the new interpretation, principals and their schools are legally liable if they fail to curb “harassment” of students, even if it takes place outside the school, on Facebook or in private conversation among a few youths.
So now the schools become liable for stuff happening outside of school. While this is certainly bad stuff and kids need some "re-education" if they are doing it, this is pushing into a dangerous slippery slope, expecting the schools to be proxy parents 24x7, and follow them everywhere. Next thing you know, your principle might be sued or go to jail just because you fail to RTFA.
Are you assuming that when one does an upgrade, it automatically re-aligns the partition starting points?
Proper partition alignment has been a long term issue that was ignored for at least a decade. Now that it is happening, the common alignment (1M, 2048 legacy sectors) might now need to change (2M, 4096 legacy sectors). In a few years, people might even get over the loss of another 2M of dirt cheap disk space (don't forget that we're all going to GPT which has another partition table at the end of the drive).
We already block one of those domains here where I work. Can you guess which one?
... the no-privacy also applies to all corporate CEOs, and all their corporate meetings and email.
Even today, cheap (that's most of them) CD players still have jitter issues. Each block (1/75th of a second) can be shifted off one direction or the other by up to 7 time samples (up to 1/6300 second). It is hard to hear that, and it doesn't happen that often, nor in a consistent way. There is some computer software designed to detect and correct this (by re-reading until it has all the data bits, then aligns them correctly) for ripping purposes. So you can actually get better than "CD quality" via ripping (where "CD quality" is defined as tolerating these little bits of jitter). Some people prefer 24 bit (instead of 16 bit) at 192 kHz (instead of 44.1 kHz). Personally, I like 32 bit and 960 kHz (it also happens to have an exact number of samples per video frame for every TV/video standard in the world that is used for media purposes).
He's a nut case. Can it be any simpler than that?
Remember the TV repairman (if you are old enough)? A dying (well, by now probably completely dead) breed. When the TV went on the fritz, he (or she in a rare few cases) would diagnose the problem and apply a fix. Usually it was just a tube that needed replacement, but sometimes a capacitor. Occasionally something would have burned out like a resistor. As transistor TVs came along, the failures went down, but not to zero. Transistors could die, too, and were harder to replace. And they were more susceptible to lightning surges from the antenna (something that back then got TV signals for free). Now days, if a TV goes bad, we just junk the whole thing and get a new one. If it was in warranty, we might get the new one for free. Too often it would die just 3 days after the warranty expired. Just 3 years ago I had a relatively new TV (a digital one, with a VGA input, too) go bad. I could tell it was the power supply delivering unstable or low voltages after it warmed up. Fortunately, it was in warranty. So it was shipped to the manufacturer. About a week later a box comes back with a replacement. This was not the one I sent in, though it was the same model. At least it worked (and has been ever since). But I still wonder if someone replaced the power supply in the one I sent in. And I wonder if someone replaced the component inside that power supply that caused it to fail or if they scrapped the whole thing. So why should failing software be any different? As a system administrator myself, I do like to at least find out what failed. But being practical, I also quota the time I spend on "failure forensics". If I can't figure it out in a few minutes for first time problems, I just reboot. If the problem happens again, then I justify more effort. If it never happens again, I never even think about it, anymore. While I love a good diagnostic challenge, it just don't make business sense to put much effort into that (unless its something we design and manufacture).
If you encrypt the entire drive, the SSD firmware will have no idea which sectors are no longer referenced and can be deleted. You won't get the performance advantage of the SSD's speculative pre-erase. And if by chance your encryption gets exposed, it will not have overwritten those sensitive sectors in files you deleted that haven't yet been re-allocated to another file. But you'll probably be a little safer overall.
The OS isn't writing to the cells directly. It's writing to a presented logical drive just above the wear-leveling layer. With this layer also doing speculative cleaning of sectors (what the OS writes) and their underlying cells based NOT on what is discarded by having written over it (where the wear leveling would write the new data on different cells, making the old cells now available ... and suitable for pre-erasing when the SSD is not busy) ... but discarded by the design of the filesystem referencing structures, then the firmware needs to know something about the filesystem to know when these discards happen. So my big question is which filesystem types do these firmwares understand? Is this just filesystems invented in Redmond? Or does it also include filesystems that are readily available without royalty costs?
Oh, and where can I find a utility for Linux/BSD that will execute a TRIM operation on the entire drive to effectively reset its mapping state (but without losing any important wear stats)?
... junk ... then close the skylight.
... management is greatly to blame on this. If they truly respected people with STEM skills, they would start paying them what they are worth, as well as giving them freedom to innovate, come up with ideas, and solve problems. A few companies already do this. More need to. Good jobs for people with STEM skills are lacking.
And yes, there is also a shortage of people with STEM skills, too. These problems are a vicious cycle. When there are fewer jobs, with less pay, and less opportunity to do great things, many people will find somewhere else to go.
Supposedly executive management has MBA skills. They should understand concepts like supply and demand. What they are trying to do is use supply and demand to cut costs. Increasing the supply by opening up access to more people in other countries does cut costs. But it also triggers the feedback mechanism, which is a slow and pervasive one due to the time frames involved in the long career incentive to education to employment cycle. That feedback mechanism reduces the supply to match the demand.
Supply and demand is elastic. But they probably learned this only in product marketing terms, where the elasticity is measured only in a year or two. The career incentive, education, and employment cycle is longer, from ten to twenty years or more, depending on where the career incentive phase is looking is getting feedback from the employment phase (e.g. seeing 40 year old engineers being mothballed and out of work makes this elasticity cycle even longer).
If management wants Americans with STEM skills, as opposed to just any Earthling with STEM skills, then they need make it happen. I suspect the reality is, they just don't care. They made their bed. They can sleep in it.
Even if it does explode with the full brightness of our sun, it won't look anything like those scenes from Tatooine. Instead of having all that light spread over a disk as wide as our sun, it will all be concentrated from what appears to us as a single point. Instead of looking like another sun, it will look more like an extremely intense electric arc. It will be even more damaging to the eye to look at it, compared to looking at the sun, because more energy is concentrated into a single point instead of a small area.
But, if, as suggested, it has merely the energy level of the moon here, since it would still be concentrated into a single point, it will still be dangerous to look at, even if it only provides a minimal amount of working light to walk around outside at night with. And that all depends on whether Orion will be in the night sky when the big event happens, or not. You might want to check the star charts for December 2012 and January 2013, if you think that's the big day.
When are they going to learn? But the big question is: which they? The users? Or the software makers?
What it comes down to is they will be adding an AAAA record to their DNS. A great many systems, including Ubuntu, will lookup AAAA records first if the resolver detects that IPv6 is enabled. Unfortunately, the way Ubuntu should to set this to be the default, there is no way to change it without a patch. That's because the only preference feature for configuration allows choosing to prefer IPv6, but not IPv4. The source defaults to preferring to IPv4, so you have a choice, unless you install the Ubuntu version. Anyway, IPv6 will be preferred if IPv6 is detected, which is probably based on there being an IPv6 address configured, possibly even the link local one every interface gets if the IPv6 stack is present. The AAAA record will be queried first. If the service has no AAAA record, a negative response is quick, and the A record is queried next. But if there is an AAAA record present, you'll get a valid answer, and the application will try to connect to it. If your network connectivity in IPv6 is not complete, you wait for it to timeout and give up retrying, before it falls back to trying IPv4.
It might be better if applications were to try IPv6 first, and try IPv4 maybe a second later, during the dual stack transition period, letting both connections be pending in parallel if there is a delay. The first to connect wins and the other socket gets closed. But I don't know how much of an impact all those extra connections will be when the IPv6 connection can't be completed within a second.
BTW, if you want to make IPv6 more popular, put more free stuff out there than is available on IPv4. Sell stuff with an IPv6 discount (6% off if you are connecting via IPv6, but 4% off if via IPv4).