I assume they want to keep speed down for the safety of the drivers? If so, allowing traction control and ABS would help with that.
I had no idea F1 was so restrictive. Are there any racing groups that allow pretty much any modifications? Although I do get the idea of limiting the speed, and shrinking the engines over time as people start to figure out how to get more power from the same size. These efficiencies could go straight into production cars, seems like.
I didn't even realize that one of our partners was using Amazon EWS until suddenly they were down all day. Amazon is really stable historically, but it's frustrating when you're out of business and all you can do is wait and see if Amazon will fix it soon.
In the "old school" thinking, smart companies have a redundant data center somewhere, humming along and waiting to be switched on if the main data center ever goes down. "The cloud" was supposed to solve that - massive redundancy within Amazon's services were supposed to protect you from outages. Not the case, apparently, since it looks like Amazon is going to fall below their promised 99.95% uptime (4.38 hours per year downtime).
I think the answer is to have redundant cloud services online, so you could switch from Amazon to Google or DevGrid if you had issues. The problem is, there's nothing quite like Amazon right now, it's not easy to switch from Amazon to some random service. This might be the biggest argument against virtual services - lack of standardization makes it hard to move from one to another, and hard to set up backup services in case of emergency.
Auctions need an economy of scale to work at all, though. If there aren't people selling there, there's no point going there to buy. If nobody's buying anything, there's no point listing it for sale there. GrouponClone needs enough people to sell, say, 100 coupons to start, and then you can grow from there. You could just run it a little leaner, and charge the restaurant slight less. It's really easy to copy. In some areas of the country, like New York, LivingSocial has way more mindshare than Groupon does, and they started later.
There are probably hundreds of developers and business people out there that just heard about this potential IPO and said "how hard can it be to make that?" Groupon should cash in now, before they get their lunch eaten by 1000 me-too competitors.
Just because you have examples of several companies that are being valued for ridiculous amounts of money, doesn't mean they're not over-valued. Twitter is a great example - a company that has no revenue stream whatsoever, and no real plans to create one, and is valued in the billions. Maybe they'll get lucky and stumble accross a business plan and I'll look stupid, but right now I don't see it.
Groupon at least generates revenue, but the fact that they have to keep raising money is strange to me. I hope they're just trying to grow faster than they would organically. At least what Google does is really hard - a nuanced algorithm that they have to constantly tweak to fight the spammers, indexing millions of websites pretty much constantly, running on home-built software on thousands of servers accross the world. It's hard to duplicate that. Groupon has a website with a deal on it, and an email list. When the deal is done they email a spreadsheet of customers to the company. When they first did a national deal (GAP Clothing) their servers went down in flames. How long would it take 10 smart guys to recreate 90% of that business? What's the $25B for? The name?
Overall, it just feels like a bubble. The rest of the economy kind of sucks, and the investors are flush with cash that they don't know what to do with, and think Groupon is the "next big thing." I guess we'll have to wait and see how it plays out in the long term.
Heh heh - the Slashdot benchmark. I like it. Load a static 600+ comment story, drag the filter bar to "show every damn thing," then time it. Hard to game that...
I was going to say... I almost treat my Roomba like a person. I feel bad when the floor is super-dirty, and I get mad at it when I have to stand where it's cleaning, and it makes a bee-line for my feet...
I definitely don't think it's impossible for people to have feelings toward a robot, even when they know it's fake.
Because using that approach, you used landmarks, updated your position on the chart, aimed as good as you could, and went for it. You'd have to account for wind speed all the time, drift of the aircraft, visibility issues, etc. This was OK when the air wasn't full of planes going 500+ mph, when you could land in random fields if you needed to, etc. And still a lot of people misjudged and ran into mountains and hills they weren't expecting.
Dead reckoning is not a reasonable way to steer a jet full of passengers, I would think. Having a backup to GPS that doesn't involve my pilot squinting out the window while clutching a map seems like a good idea to me.
What is Wikipedia's obsession about deleting things that "aren't noteworthy?" Putting aside the fact that "noteworthiness" is pretty subjective, why is there a whole system in place to purge articles? Are they running out of disk space? Is the system not scaling?
I can understand that they should probably purge spam articles, or articles about nothing that people try to put up ("Gramma Jones' Shortbread Recipe"), but why are they going to all this trouble to purge articles about real people, that did stuff? As a writer, do you have to win a Pulitzer or something to get in Wikipedia?
What idiot trusts car mechanics? "Oh, I think I'll take one of my most valuable physical possessions, that I depend on for my livelihood, take it to some guy I barely know, and have him mess around in there and fix stuff. Yeah! And even if it's something I could do myself for half the price, like an oil change, I'll still have this guy do it."
I don't cut my own hair, I don't grow my own food, and I don't run my own offsite redundant backup system, or host my own email. Partly I just don't want to, and partly I suspect that I'm probably not the best at that stuff, and I'd rather pay a little to have a professional do it. It's not foolproof, as we can see from this story, but it still seems like the better bet in the long term.
Games like King's Quest have relatively low graphics levels, require little computational power, and the interface is generally pretty simple ("Go North", "Look", etc).
Wouldn't these make great smartphone games? Just make sure it autosaves all the time, and also add the ability to save manually (to restart something if you get stuck or dead). I'd love to play half an hour of King's Quest on the train.
VGA was 640 x 480, and my Moto Droid (sideways) is 854 x 480, more than enough. You'd actually have to letterbox it!
"Knowing that I hovered a link teaches you nothing."
Really? You read the description of the page, thought it looked interesting, and then hovered over the link to see the URL. It sounds like I can tell a lot about that link from the fact that you hovered over it. You found it to be a potentially useful link, but then bailed on the URL. For other links, you dismissed them out of hand. If Google could figure out what in the page description interested you, and surfaced more pages similar to that page, they'd have a higher chance of presenting you with a link you find useful.
BTW, the abstract of the paper indicates that there is a study out there that shows a strong correlation between cursor position and where the user's gaze is. The typical Slashdot crowd may not do this, but I have no doubt that my mom might let the cursor roam wherever her eyes look. In driving, the car steers where you look, in snowboarding you go where you look... it's pretty common. I would not be surprised at all if the same thing occurred on computers.
Right? If anything, you get WAY more info about watching patterns from DVRs than you do from Neilson. I could believe that there maybe aren't enough Tivo subscribers to extrapolate from, but there have to be millions of Comcast DVRs out there.
It is well worth the $100/year to shell out for an online webspace to store your photos if you want to keep them for life.
10 gb is nothing, just setup a background process to sync and limit it's upload bandwidth, and it'll do it over a few days/weeks, no matter how big your file is.
That way even if your external dies, or gets stolen, you have that ace in the hole.
Peace of mind, especially for valuable memories, is worth the money, plus it has the added benefit of giving you a way to share photos with friends/family easily. Plus any other things you want to do with some webspace.
The reason i recommend buying a full webspace somewhere rather than dedicated backup utilities is because you can normally get more storage/cheaper, and have a little better direct control over your data, with the added convenience of access through http!
Totally agree with this. I used to just keep stuff on my laptop, backing up from the laptop to an external drive since I know drives aren't fail-proof. I see others recommending this setup too.
Then, some douchbag broke into our house and did a quick grab, got the laptops and the external drive. I felt pretty stupid. All photos, etc that weren't in Flickr were gone. Every single photo my wife took in England that summer are gone forever. Live and learn, I guess.
Now I dump pretty much all pictures in Flickr, and Carbonite backs up my whole hard drive automatically, so it'll save my documents, tax stuff, etc. There's the old saying: there are two kinds of people, those who back up regularly, and those who have never lost their data before. Definitely true.
And if you're performing illicit activities, wouldn't you want to use a pre-paid credit card for that? Why would you use your official MasterCard, which has you home address listed, reports to credit agencies, has sales records that could be subpoenaed... Why not just buy drugs with your MasterCard while you're at it. Seems pretty stupid.
I also don't get what MasterCard gets out of sucking up to the RIAA et al.
Sure, but what you have right now is multiple points of failure, which is worse. If any of the dumb websites you use (any single one) gets hacked, then the password you use everywhere is useless.
I'd rather sign up with Verisign or somebody, who's entire business is security, who can give me a hardware fob for 2-factor authentication, or via SMS, whatever. If Verisign gets hacked, I just have to fix it in 1 place - at Verisign. With what we have now, these poor schmucks get to go change every account they have. How is that better?
It protects you against automated attacks, but not people. If I saw that your password for Gawker was s3cret4gawker, I could try s3cret4chase, s3cret4usbank, etc for awhile until I got a hit. Chances are you're using the same username in all places too, it's just easier to remember.
So it's better than using the exact same password, but it wouldn't be that hard to figure out the pattern you were using.
Sure, but this looks like a loosing battle. My "good" password pattern that I use for my computer, bank, etc, is 9 characters long. This is definitely approaching the limit of what I can remember, or be bothered to type in all the time. From you post, it sounds like cracking a 9-digit password via rainbow tables is pretty trivial, yeah? As computers get faster and storage gets cheaper, the value of "trivial" gets correspondingly larger, but humans aren't getting any better at remembering passwords.
SecureID may not be the answer (I have a tough time figuring out how to implement it, and few sites support it) but we need something. It's not reasonable to expect people to generate and keep track of dozens of unique passwords for all of the sites they use, especially if the passwords have to be > 12 digits. Breaches like this will keep happening, we need to think about moving beyond username/password for these things.
"I suspect most people don't stream more than 1 movie per week."
For now, maybe. But it seems like viewing video online is definitely here to stay. I actually watch much more than 1 movie per week from Netflix, since I like to watch old TV shows pretty regularly. Ideally, I would like to cut the cable completely and watch Netflix/Hulu/etc. Do you think the ISPs could handle it if we all were watching videos that way? If they started upgrading the networks right now, how long would it take them to get to that level?
Just because current speeds are arguably "ok" for most people's current usages doesn't mean the ISPs should stop trying to make it faster. Just getting to the speed that allows medium-quality videos resulted in a bunch of great innovations like YouTube, Hulu, and of course ChatRoulette. If it was even faster, what else could be invented, that we can't even imagine right now?
Also, DNS is for more than just convenience. We used to have various other systems to find the IP address of a host that we knew was out there (Archie?), and now DNS maps human-recallable names to an address.
Let's say the DNS entry for twitter.com was pulled down. What's the IP address for Twitter? I have no idea. Even if I Google it, the Google entry still points me to "http://twitter.com" We nerds could probably figure out a way around it; find somebody that posted the address somewhere, type it in manually, update our hosts file, etc. But to the vast majority of internet users that might be interested, wikileaks.org has effectively disappeared.
Interestingly, when you Google "wikileaks" right now, Google points you to http://213.251.145.96/ I assume they had to hack that somehow, so kudos to Google. Since a lot of people apparently do a search for wherever they want to go rather than entering the URL, this may have less of an effect than the government would want.
Sorry, OT, but... what did happen to mod points? I haven't been selected as moderator in a long time - it used to happen every couple of weeks. They must have changed something.
Some interesting results (to me). On supporting the new scanners: 64% support, 37% strongly 32% oppose, 18% strongly
So overall it has support from those surveyed, but 45% are in the middle. The survey also asks people how much they fly, so I'd be interested to see how frequency of flying correlates with support of the scanners. I can see that if you fly once a year, you might not care too much. If you get frisked every week in your suit and tie, you may not be so supportive.
The pat-down is more polarized, with 48% saying it's justified, and 50% saying it's not.
70% support profiling
The top 3 criteria for profiling were Personal Behavior, Travel History, and Nationality. For Race and Religion, more people opposed it than supported it, which is refreshing, although there was more support than I would like (40%)
When your livelihood requires that you fly, it's kind of bogus to claim that you are flying voluntarily. On that same argument, you are not "required" to work in a mine, so we really shouldn't force safety standards on mine operators. They can just go work somewhere else, right? Most of us believe that safety standards are a Good Thing overall, although I know some people disagree. Those people generally have not been forced by circumstance to work jobs that really need OSHA standards, so I don't have a lot of patience for that.
The concept that just because you do something of your own volition, you sign away all of your rights, is ridiculous. It's not unreasonable to demand that the TSA only take those steps that are demonstrably effective, and don't cross the line of being gross violations of our rights. It's not unreasonable to expect them to do their jobs better, and not resort to security theater.
When the TSA figures out how to scan ALL of the luggage, not just some of it, without valuables "disappearing", when they take some lessons from countries that have been dealing with actual threats for years, when they are consistent from airport to airport in the SAME COUNTRY, get back to me. Until then, stop poking screaming 6 year olds, stop lying about what your scanners can and cannot do... just stop already.
Slashdot Mirror
I had no idea F1 was so restrictive. Are there any racing groups that allow pretty much any modifications? Although I do get the idea of limiting the speed, and shrinking the engines over time as people start to figure out how to get more power from the same size. These efficiencies could go straight into production cars, seems like.
I didn't even realize that one of our partners was using Amazon EWS until suddenly they were down all day. Amazon is really stable historically, but it's frustrating when you're out of business and all you can do is wait and see if Amazon will fix it soon.
In the "old school" thinking, smart companies have a redundant data center somewhere, humming along and waiting to be switched on if the main data center ever goes down. "The cloud" was supposed to solve that - massive redundancy within Amazon's services were supposed to protect you from outages. Not the case, apparently, since it looks like Amazon is going to fall below their promised 99.95% uptime (4.38 hours per year downtime).
I think the answer is to have redundant cloud services online, so you could switch from Amazon to Google or DevGrid if you had issues. The problem is, there's nothing quite like Amazon right now, it's not easy to switch from Amazon to some random service. This might be the biggest argument against virtual services - lack of standardization makes it hard to move from one to another, and hard to set up backup services in case of emergency.
Auctions need an economy of scale to work at all, though. If there aren't people selling there, there's no point going there to buy. If nobody's buying anything, there's no point listing it for sale there. GrouponClone needs enough people to sell, say, 100 coupons to start, and then you can grow from there. You could just run it a little leaner, and charge the restaurant slight less. It's really easy to copy. In some areas of the country, like New York, LivingSocial has way more mindshare than Groupon does, and they started later.
There are probably hundreds of developers and business people out there that just heard about this potential IPO and said "how hard can it be to make that?" Groupon should cash in now, before they get their lunch eaten by 1000 me-too competitors.
Just because you have examples of several companies that are being valued for ridiculous amounts of money, doesn't mean they're not over-valued. Twitter is a great example - a company that has no revenue stream whatsoever, and no real plans to create one, and is valued in the billions. Maybe they'll get lucky and stumble accross a business plan and I'll look stupid, but right now I don't see it.
Groupon at least generates revenue, but the fact that they have to keep raising money is strange to me. I hope they're just trying to grow faster than they would organically. At least what Google does is really hard - a nuanced algorithm that they have to constantly tweak to fight the spammers, indexing millions of websites pretty much constantly, running on home-built software on thousands of servers accross the world. It's hard to duplicate that. Groupon has a website with a deal on it, and an email list. When the deal is done they email a spreadsheet of customers to the company. When they first did a national deal (GAP Clothing) their servers went down in flames. How long would it take 10 smart guys to recreate 90% of that business? What's the $25B for? The name?
Overall, it just feels like a bubble. The rest of the economy kind of sucks, and the investors are flush with cash that they don't know what to do with, and think Groupon is the "next big thing." I guess we'll have to wait and see how it plays out in the long term.
Heh heh - the Slashdot benchmark. I like it. Load a static 600+ comment story, drag the filter bar to "show every damn thing," then time it. Hard to game that...
I was going to say ... I almost treat my Roomba like a person. I feel bad when the floor is super-dirty, and I get mad at it when I have to stand where it's cleaning, and it makes a bee-line for my feet ...
I definitely don't think it's impossible for people to have feelings toward a robot, even when they know it's fake.
Heh. I grew up in Kananga in the 80's, I probably met you. Still nostalgic about Cesna's and dirt airstrips. Beats driving.
Dead reckoning is not a reasonable way to steer a jet full of passengers, I would think. Having a backup to GPS that doesn't involve my pilot squinting out the window while clutching a map seems like a good idea to me.
I can understand that they should probably purge spam articles, or articles about nothing that people try to put up ("Gramma Jones' Shortbread Recipe"), but why are they going to all this trouble to purge articles about real people, that did stuff? As a writer, do you have to win a Pulitzer or something to get in Wikipedia?
What idiot trusts car mechanics? "Oh, I think I'll take one of my most valuable physical possessions, that I depend on for my livelihood, take it to some guy I barely know, and have him mess around in there and fix stuff. Yeah! And even if it's something I could do myself for half the price, like an oil change, I'll still have this guy do it."
I don't cut my own hair, I don't grow my own food, and I don't run my own offsite redundant backup system, or host my own email. Partly I just don't want to, and partly I suspect that I'm probably not the best at that stuff, and I'd rather pay a little to have a professional do it. It's not foolproof, as we can see from this story, but it still seems like the better bet in the long term.
Games like King's Quest have relatively low graphics levels, require little computational power, and the interface is generally pretty simple ("Go North", "Look", etc). Wouldn't these make great smartphone games? Just make sure it autosaves all the time, and also add the ability to save manually (to restart something if you get stuck or dead). I'd love to play half an hour of King's Quest on the train. VGA was 640 x 480, and my Moto Droid (sideways) is 854 x 480, more than enough. You'd actually have to letterbox it!
Really? You read the description of the page, thought it looked interesting, and then hovered over the link to see the URL. It sounds like I can tell a lot about that link from the fact that you hovered over it. You found it to be a potentially useful link, but then bailed on the URL. For other links, you dismissed them out of hand. If Google could figure out what in the page description interested you, and surfaced more pages similar to that page, they'd have a higher chance of presenting you with a link you find useful.
BTW, the abstract of the paper indicates that there is a study out there that shows a strong correlation between cursor position and where the user's gaze is. The typical Slashdot crowd may not do this, but I have no doubt that my mom might let the cursor roam wherever her eyes look. In driving, the car steers where you look, in snowboarding you go where you look ... it's pretty common. I would not be surprised at all if the same thing occurred on computers.
How would releasing it simultaneously worldwide cut into US sales? Then, you'd never have to worry about cracking at all, right?
Oh, yeah, they want to sell it in different countries at different price points. Lame.
Right? If anything, you get WAY more info about watching patterns from DVRs than you do from Neilson. I could believe that there maybe aren't enough Tivo subscribers to extrapolate from, but there have to be millions of Comcast DVRs out there.
It is well worth the $100/year to shell out for an online webspace to store your photos if you want to keep them for life. 10 gb is nothing, just setup a background process to sync and limit it's upload bandwidth, and it'll do it over a few days/weeks, no matter how big your file is.
That way even if your external dies, or gets stolen, you have that ace in the hole.
Peace of mind, especially for valuable memories, is worth the money, plus it has the added benefit of giving you a way to share photos with friends/family easily. Plus any other things you want to do with some webspace.
The reason i recommend buying a full webspace somewhere rather than dedicated backup utilities is because you can normally get more storage/cheaper, and have a little better direct control over your data, with the added convenience of access through http!
Totally agree with this. I used to just keep stuff on my laptop, backing up from the laptop to an external drive since I know drives aren't fail-proof. I see others recommending this setup too.
Then, some douchbag broke into our house and did a quick grab, got the laptops and the external drive. I felt pretty stupid. All photos, etc that weren't in Flickr were gone. Every single photo my wife took in England that summer are gone forever. Live and learn, I guess.
Now I dump pretty much all pictures in Flickr, and Carbonite backs up my whole hard drive automatically, so it'll save my documents, tax stuff, etc. There's the old saying: there are two kinds of people, those who back up regularly, and those who have never lost their data before. Definitely true.
And if you're performing illicit activities, wouldn't you want to use a pre-paid credit card for that? Why would you use your official MasterCard, which has you home address listed, reports to credit agencies, has sales records that could be subpoenaed ... Why not just buy drugs with your MasterCard while you're at it. Seems pretty stupid.
I also don't get what MasterCard gets out of sucking up to the RIAA et al.
Sure, but what you have right now is multiple points of failure, which is worse. If any of the dumb websites you use (any single one) gets hacked, then the password you use everywhere is useless.
I'd rather sign up with Verisign or somebody, who's entire business is security, who can give me a hardware fob for 2-factor authentication, or via SMS, whatever. If Verisign gets hacked, I just have to fix it in 1 place - at Verisign. With what we have now, these poor schmucks get to go change every account they have. How is that better?
It protects you against automated attacks, but not people. If I saw that your password for Gawker was s3cret4gawker, I could try s3cret4chase, s3cret4usbank, etc for awhile until I got a hit. Chances are you're using the same username in all places too, it's just easier to remember.
So it's better than using the exact same password, but it wouldn't be that hard to figure out the pattern you were using.
Sure, but this looks like a loosing battle. My "good" password pattern that I use for my computer, bank, etc, is 9 characters long. This is definitely approaching the limit of what I can remember, or be bothered to type in all the time. From you post, it sounds like cracking a 9-digit password via rainbow tables is pretty trivial, yeah? As computers get faster and storage gets cheaper, the value of "trivial" gets correspondingly larger, but humans aren't getting any better at remembering passwords.
SecureID may not be the answer (I have a tough time figuring out how to implement it, and few sites support it) but we need something. It's not reasonable to expect people to generate and keep track of dozens of unique passwords for all of the sites they use, especially if the passwords have to be > 12 digits. Breaches like this will keep happening, we need to think about moving beyond username/password for these things.
For now, maybe. But it seems like viewing video online is definitely here to stay. I actually watch much more than 1 movie per week from Netflix, since I like to watch old TV shows pretty regularly. Ideally, I would like to cut the cable completely and watch Netflix/Hulu/etc. Do you think the ISPs could handle it if we all were watching videos that way? If they started upgrading the networks right now, how long would it take them to get to that level?
Just because current speeds are arguably "ok" for most people's current usages doesn't mean the ISPs should stop trying to make it faster. Just getting to the speed that allows medium-quality videos resulted in a bunch of great innovations like YouTube, Hulu, and of course ChatRoulette. If it was even faster, what else could be invented, that we can't even imagine right now?
Also, DNS is for more than just convenience. We used to have various other systems to find the IP address of a host that we knew was out there (Archie?), and now DNS maps human-recallable names to an address.
Let's say the DNS entry for twitter.com was pulled down. What's the IP address for Twitter? I have no idea. Even if I Google it, the Google entry still points me to "http://twitter.com" We nerds could probably figure out a way around it; find somebody that posted the address somewhere, type it in manually, update our hosts file, etc. But to the vast majority of internet users that might be interested, wikileaks.org has effectively disappeared.
Interestingly, when you Google "wikileaks" right now, Google points you to http://213.251.145.96/ I assume they had to hack that somehow, so kudos to Google. Since a lot of people apparently do a search for wherever they want to go rather than entering the URL, this may have less of an effect than the government would want.
Sorry, OT, but ... what did happen to mod points? I haven't been selected as moderator in a long time - it used to happen every couple of weeks. They must have changed something.
See, it's already been done - the World of Warcraft sequel lets you play a character who is playing World of Warcraft!!! How cool is that?!
Kudos to the Washington Post for putting the survey results up.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll_11222010.html
Some interesting results (to me). On supporting the new scanners:
64% support, 37% strongly
32% oppose, 18% strongly
So overall it has support from those surveyed, but 45% are in the middle. The survey also asks people how much they fly, so I'd be interested to see how frequency of flying correlates with support of the scanners. I can see that if you fly once a year, you might not care too much. If you get frisked every week in your suit and tie, you may not be so supportive.
The pat-down is more polarized, with 48% saying it's justified, and 50% saying it's not.
70% support profiling
The top 3 criteria for profiling were Personal Behavior, Travel History, and Nationality. For Race and Religion, more people opposed it than supported it, which is refreshing, although there was more support than I would like (40%)
When your livelihood requires that you fly, it's kind of bogus to claim that you are flying voluntarily. On that same argument, you are not "required" to work in a mine, so we really shouldn't force safety standards on mine operators. They can just go work somewhere else, right? Most of us believe that safety standards are a Good Thing overall, although I know some people disagree. Those people generally have not been forced by circumstance to work jobs that really need OSHA standards, so I don't have a lot of patience for that.
The concept that just because you do something of your own volition, you sign away all of your rights, is ridiculous. It's not unreasonable to demand that the TSA only take those steps that are demonstrably effective, and don't cross the line of being gross violations of our rights. It's not unreasonable to expect them to do their jobs better, and not resort to security theater.
When the TSA figures out how to scan ALL of the luggage, not just some of it, without valuables "disappearing", when they take some lessons from countries that have been dealing with actual threats for years, when they are consistent from airport to airport in the SAME COUNTRY, get back to me. Until then, stop poking screaming 6 year olds, stop lying about what your scanners can and cannot do ... just stop already.