True, but even one day wasted over these petty quibbles is one day too many. If anyone is to blame, it's the police officer for completely distorting the facts at the crime scene. It could be argued that the officer created a bigger problem than the brain dead vehicular sodomizer.
Now look at it this way: if you just got rear-ended, are injured, and the one person you're counting on to take care of the situation, the police officer, does the exact opposite of what you expect... your sense of reality just got shaked up right there, compounded by the state of shock you're in. That series of events triggers fear and distrust, instinctive emotional reactions. You're not so sure if you're innocent anymore, because someone in a (false) position of authority has challenged that common sense.
There exists a point where police ceases to be effective, and starts attracting trouble. Sadly that always gets spun around as justification for even more control. It's an equilibrium, more cops, more problems, more criminals.
I would never dream of running Gentoo on anything less than bleeding-edge hardware, just to help with all the compiling. I love binary distros for the older machines, simply because I can get a basic system up in minutes with 64mb ram and a gig or two of disk.
That said, I used to run a 16-core opteron rig for kicks. Portage could never seem to max out all the processors on that thing, it probably spent more time dicking around for I/O than compiling. I like Portage, but I'm really not fond of its general slowness whenever dealing with the tree. Call me impatient, but I hate having to wait a minute for the dependency "calculation" on a single package, especially given the relative supremacy of my desktop rig. I guess that's what happens when you use Python for anything serious.
Amature is a portmanteau of Amateur and Mature, and is typically used to classify pornography featuring ugly old no-talent underperforming participants.
'least that's what I think of it. Surely these people can't be illiterate in this day and age...:P
Agreed. Having played far more bad games than good, I just don't buy anything anymore unless I've had a chance to try it first, whether it's a demo, rental or a ripped version leeched from TPB. Many games these days are big budget flops, and I already hate the $50-60 price tag enough even for good titles, that if I waste that kind of money on a boring frustrating pile of crap, I usually end up wanting to kill small helpless animals. I think you'll agree it's a lesser atrocity to download a game than to brutalize a dozen bunnies.
Much like the RIAA/MPAA are more than partly to blame for poor sales, so is the game industry. Piracy is a constant, it's going to happen no matter what, because in this day and age, it's trivial for anyone to copy anything. The difference between honest people and pirates boils down to a willingness to pay money to support a product they appreciate. If I go to EB to pick up the latest game, it's because I really like the game and WANT to give money to its developers, because I could have downloaded it in the time it took to drive to the store.
What's probably happening here isn't AmeriTrade selling your email address, it's far more likely that some untrustworthy employee is doing this on the side for extra cash. How hard would it be for a sysadmin to take a few backup tapes home for "offsite storage", compile a list of valuable data and sell it to spammers, collection agencies and any other dirty company ? It's extremely difficult to trace and given the size of some of these companies, there could be literally thousands of suspects.
Lord knows, he could even be in cahoots with a competitor to smear AmeriTrade's reputation. Or maybe it's just some idiot exec with spyware on his PC, letting all of Korea in.
It's a shame I don't live in the USA because that happened to me once. It was a boring old retail job, and we had exceptionally high turnover that year so I ended up as the one with most seniority. Then we hired 2 teenagers to handle night shifts and weekends, and money started disappearing. We're talking half the night's take would go missing, and we couldn't tell if it was a computer glitch (happened fairly often) or sneaky staff. I even shadowed each employee for at least one shift to see if they were either miscalculating or outright stealing, but we never found any hard evidence to nail anyone. Then one day, one of the new kids showed up for work on my shift, and was about to leave when the phone rang. The boss said "You need to leave, and XXX is taking your place. You already know why". I found out later through a mutual acquaintance that he suspected me of some type of "hacking" endeavour to fudge the cash totals, based on the fact that I'm a computer god. Of course, even after my departure, money still went missing on a daily basis, and he eventually fired everyone and started over with all new people. I showed up to gloat a few weeks later, and the boss still complained that he didn't trust his staff.
Years later, I found out it was the boss' own son who was stealing from the business. Being in Canada, I never really contemplated suing but it certainly shows how much damage can be done from an "unofficial" accusation. Despite working there for three years, and previously getting along fine with the boss, I could never use him as a work reference. I'm sure that hurt me back in those years when I was looking for a new job, as I was young and it would have been a strong reference were it not for that load of bull.
Excellent rebuttal!:) Still I find it difficult to grasp why something like Lina would be better than just directly releasing compatibility libraries for various platforms. What's the benefit of the extra level of indirection ? Instead of going GTK -> Lina -> Win32GUI, why not immediately go from GTK to Win32 ?
From another perspective, why couldn't we just have compilers for various language that output Java bytecode ? The level of effort required for porting seems the same either way, only we wouldn't have to invent yet another virtual machine.
Sounds about right, except nobody posted anything meaty, like making massive edits to the PHP code base to strip out fluff, or implementing an interpreter-level cache that encapsulates multiple script invocations into one persistent execution, or just buying more friggin hardware:)
I'd never claim to be an everyman, but I broke 2TB on my desktop three years ago with a huge pile of SATA drives and a couple extra controller cards. Besides, chicks dig the little side-cart full of hard drives:) I just took a couple of four-slot drive cages from cheap PC cases and built them into an enclosure, complete with its own ATX power supply.
Of course that was before I jumped onto the NAS storage cash cow, doing pretty much exactly what the article poster wrote, only I turned around and sold my PC-based NAS boxes for about half the price of "enterprise" solutions, which still represents a 400% markup for me:)
You have to realize, the companies and people building these overpriced RAID arrays are just your average greedy bastard, usually no smarter or more skilled than any other geek. Most of the computer-attached devices today are little more than an XScale processor, a tiny bit of RAM and Linux. Broadband routers, NAS boxes, KVM/IP switches, "smart" network adapters, heck I wouldn't be surprised to find home entertainment devices running Linux. We're in the age of mashups, where any idiot with a marketing budget can slap various I/O ports on a board and "invent" appliances.
As everyone else pointed out, XBMC is for the original Xbox. I've been using it for years, and I absolutely love it. I use it to stream videos from a Samba server, which is how I can leave my DVDs in a storage locker while still having access to 450+ movies without getting my fat ass off the couch. It also handles music and photos, though I've never used the photo features but I do occasionally play Shoutcast streams with it on the big stereo.
One of the nice things about XBMC is its skinning capabilities. It has had Mac-like style and flair for years, making PC-based media players look old and boring. Considering that XBoxes can be found for less than $100 including a remote, it's cheaper and more reliable than any half-decent DivX-enabled DVD player. Even 720p high-def plays fine with most source formats, and plays smoothly on the puny little CPU since most of the video processing is done by the GPU.
Why is DNS so complicated anyway ?
on
DNS Complexity
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I often find myself wondering why most internet standards are so complex in the first place. Let's face it: DNS looks up a name in a database and spits out a number. It's like a phone book for the internet (white pages, that is). So then, why the hell is it such a pain to configure with its weird-ass zone files that half the world seems to struggle with, and obscure vulnerabilities like cache poisoning. Why can't it be as simple as "domain = IP" or "I don't know, but server X might" because that's basically what's going on, only it's buried under a pile of nerd filth that all but its originators truly grok.
Here's one big pain in the butt: listing name servers for a domain. Why the hell don't we use IP addresses for those ? Instead you have a chicken and egg situation where you would need to contact ns1.something.tld to ask about its own address, so instead we cheat with "hints" in the parent server's records and end up listing the IP anyway, making the nameserver's name redundant. Things like that make me wonder what the designers were smoking that day. In the end, it's all just a big relational database, only the tables are each stored on different hosts but the links work the same way, so why the big headache ?
The problem with this scenario is that the court system is inefficient and drawn out. For the average working person with a life, where you have to miss work to show up in court, it's easier to just pay the stupid little fee and go on with your functional life. It would certainly be more satisfying to hold out until justice is truly served (and then hire someone to put the widow out of her misery), but in this case she paid $85 to make this cascade of insult and injury go away.
To me, that right there is more than sufficient proof to show that the system is failing the very people it's supposed to protect. It's one thing to grieve the loss of a spouse, but it certainly doesn't give someone a hall pass to skip out on the rules of society. The whole legal system and constitution were originally intended to ensure the stability and sustainability of a nation, to weed out the bad apples and protect those who make the world go round. A widowed space cadet who can't even wrap her worried head around such basic things as auto insurance and safety, I have no respect nor pity for her. If my spouse were to suddenly die, am I expected to just give up on life and cease to be a functional member of society ? I'm sorry, but I just don't see myself trawling about the city like a lost soul, not now at age 27, and not when I'm 67 either. I certainly wouldn't want to be dragging others down into a spiral of loathing and deceit like the fireman's widow did.
We need to rethink the way the game is played. Decades of corruption on all levels is quickly leading the civilized world into chaos and defeat. We don't worry about global warming and overpopulation because deep down, we all know we'll end up killing each other long before mother nature does.
WoW is a nice cheap drug. You click a few things, do some easy quests and you get a reward every few minutes. You don't have to worry about conspiracies, the worst you may need to contend with is your guildmates whining that locks and BE are OP, but that's what/gkick is for:)
My opinion about hidden configs is that if they were meant for the end-user to dick with, they'd be on a friendly Options dialog.
If there's a very useful hidden option, it should be promoted to a visible widget. The fact that Firefox devs are often lazy about such "little" things is the main source of problems. They spend too much time building flashy (and useless) features instead of tightening the existing experience, which is why you see a new FF 3.0 attention-grab every couple of days. They've gone completely Microsoft!
I think they mean PC RPGs like the Elder Scrolls series, which play like a very unpopular MMO;) The kind of game where you spend more time designing your character than actually playing. Story-based RPGs (Final Fantasy and the like) are an entirely different affair, as they play like an interactive story.
One main difference is the PC-style RPG has somewhat higher replay value, as you probably didn't discover everything on the first run. On the other hand, Final Fantasy is so long and linear that you'll be selling it minutes after you beat it, because you really don't want to sit through all those long emo cutscenes again, but you probably enjoyed discovering it the the first time through.
I don't really think single-player RPGs should worry about MMOs all that much. Many MMO players enjoy the team aspect, forming guilds and pursuing massive raids with their virtual brothers. The actual role playing is just a vehicle for social interaction, most people being obsessed with gaining levels and looting better gear. Single-player RPGs tend to be more cerebral (or less cheesy).
Comparing RPGs to MMOs is kind of like saying Tetrinet vs Gameboy... different playing style, different end users.
Reading this slashvertisement has left me wondering what the hell these Israelis were trying to solve in the first place.
It's a USB device (not a USB key, dammit!) that merely houses an embedded processor, with funky drivers that mess with the network stack in order to route traffic through the gadget. You're piping your 100mbit line both ways over USB, which is such a dumb idea. It offloads the firewall process from your main CPU, but then ties it up waiting on USB I/O. It also raises the same issue as VM firewalls, where attackers are still connecting directly to your PC, you're just blindly hoping that the "raw" hop between the interface itself and the firewall won't be compromised.
This is hardly any different from running a pure software firewall like Zone Alarm or whatever's big these days. Adding a puny little embedded processor doesn't do all that much. If you worry about your idle CPU cycles so much that you'd throw $180 at a silly gadget like this, then I can think of several other options that are less hackish and platform-agnostic.
1. Spend that $180 to get a faster CPU, mitigating the performance hit of a software firewall 2. Buy/find an old Pentium-133 for ten bucks and install a Linux firewall (even a prebuilt one like SmoothWall) 3. Go to Worst Buy, Jerkit City or Mallwart and buy a $30 broadband router 4. Unplug your computer, bury it in 6 feet of concrete, post an armed guard nearby and find yourself a less stressful hobby
To combat illiteracy, I think we should exclusively confine all life-saving information to printed material. Don't tell kids not to jump in front of speeding vehicles, or poke themselves in the face with sharp knives, or leap off tall buildings... keep that information in books. Give it a few years, and illiteracy will be a think of the past, since all the dumb kids will be dead:)
I don't care if the Chinese gov't wants to go to cyberwar with the US. Just keep their idiot script kiddies off my subnet. I already block most of China and Korea at the router, which sucks for the potentially good people over there but I really don't need a thousand different brute-force SSH attacks per day. Within a week of a new server being online, I had auto-blocked 13 thousand IPs which was seriously bogging down the system, so I just nullrouted the subnets altogether.
Gah you kids and your puny little tricks... back in the good old days, if a friend was too drunk to drive, we'd tackle him, steal his keys and drive the car 8 hours north to Sudbury and sell it to some Canadian redneck for more beer money. By the time we bussed back home we'd be ready to drink again:)
Too late, Iraq already knows the earth is flat, the curvature is just a lens effect from outer space. Osama is going to bring Mars down and use it like a fly swatter to squish us all.
Well now thanks for that wealth of information. It runs Linux, and Linux applications, then translates QT and GTK function calls into the host OS' equivalent GUI API through some kind of "fourth wall" tunnel. The idea I guess, is that people will run Windows/Mac as their primary OS, then run Linux apps through Lina to make them appear "natively" on their desktop in a clipping frame, much like Parallels Coherence does on the Mac.
As much as I like Linux and open-source, this just sounds like a hopeless idea. People want to run Windows apps on Linux (wine), not the other way around. Let's face it, most graphical OSS software packages are clones of original Windows or Mac apps. The few cool Linux GUI apps that matter usually get ported to Win32 anyway, making this whole VM exercise pointless.
I certainly agree with you about information overload. I often times find myself way over my head when all I need is an intro to some topic. This article is neither overloading nor introductory, and I think my biggest problem is that it misses the mark with regards to its target audience. It's offering these horribly basic configuration "tips" that would normally be the first thing a server admin would do, but trying to present them as "performance tips" is complete disinformation. I think the kind of readership on/. and IBM's tech blog would have wanted some nitty gritty on some new tricks to squeeze even more juice out of our already-tuned setups, like the very popular Lighttpd article I linked in my previous comment.
If it had been titled "How to properly configure your LAMP stack", I would probably have been ok with it. Actually I would have ignored it completely because such things are trivial to me. Calling them performance tips is unnecessary hype. What if it were about auto maintenance, titled "Optimize your engine and make your car go faster" when it was just a PSA about changing your oil regularly and checking your tire pressure ? My gripe is simply that this article claims to be something it's not. The information contained within is still accurate and valuable to some, that's something I can't deny.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but even one day wasted over these petty quibbles is one day too many. If anyone is to blame, it's the police officer for completely distorting the facts at the crime scene. It could be argued that the officer created a bigger problem than the brain dead vehicular sodomizer.
Now look at it this way: if you just got rear-ended, are injured, and the one person you're counting on to take care of the situation, the police officer, does the exact opposite of what you expect... your sense of reality just got shaked up right there, compounded by the state of shock you're in. That series of events triggers fear and distrust, instinctive emotional reactions. You're not so sure if you're innocent anymore, because someone in a (false) position of authority has challenged that common sense.
There exists a point where police ceases to be effective, and starts attracting trouble. Sadly that always gets spun around as justification for even more control. It's an equilibrium, more cops, more problems, more criminals.
I would never dream of running Gentoo on anything less than bleeding-edge hardware, just to help with all the compiling. I love binary distros for the older machines, simply because I can get a basic system up in minutes with 64mb ram and a gig or two of disk.
That said, I used to run a 16-core opteron rig for kicks. Portage could never seem to max out all the processors on that thing, it probably spent more time dicking around for I/O than compiling. I like Portage, but I'm really not fond of its general slowness whenever dealing with the tree. Call me impatient, but I hate having to wait a minute for the dependency "calculation" on a single package, especially given the relative supremacy of my desktop rig. I guess that's what happens when you use Python for anything serious.
Amature is a portmanteau of Amateur and Mature, and is typically used to classify pornography featuring ugly old no-talent underperforming participants.
:P
'least that's what I think of it. Surely these people can't be illiterate in this day and age...
Agreed. Having played far more bad games than good, I just don't buy anything anymore unless I've had a chance to try it first, whether it's a demo, rental or a ripped version leeched from TPB. Many games these days are big budget flops, and I already hate the $50-60 price tag enough even for good titles, that if I waste that kind of money on a boring frustrating pile of crap, I usually end up wanting to kill small helpless animals. I think you'll agree it's a lesser atrocity to download a game than to brutalize a dozen bunnies.
Much like the RIAA/MPAA are more than partly to blame for poor sales, so is the game industry. Piracy is a constant, it's going to happen no matter what, because in this day and age, it's trivial for anyone to copy anything. The difference between honest people and pirates boils down to a willingness to pay money to support a product they appreciate. If I go to EB to pick up the latest game, it's because I really like the game and WANT to give money to its developers, because I could have downloaded it in the time it took to drive to the store.
What's probably happening here isn't AmeriTrade selling your email address, it's far more likely that some untrustworthy employee is doing this on the side for extra cash. How hard would it be for a sysadmin to take a few backup tapes home for "offsite storage", compile a list of valuable data and sell it to spammers, collection agencies and any other dirty company ? It's extremely difficult to trace and given the size of some of these companies, there could be literally thousands of suspects.
Lord knows, he could even be in cahoots with a competitor to smear AmeriTrade's reputation. Or maybe it's just some idiot exec with spyware on his PC, letting all of Korea in.
It's a shame I don't live in the USA because that happened to me once. It was a boring old retail job, and we had exceptionally high turnover that year so I ended up as the one with most seniority. Then we hired 2 teenagers to handle night shifts and weekends, and money started disappearing. We're talking half the night's take would go missing, and we couldn't tell if it was a computer glitch (happened fairly often) or sneaky staff. I even shadowed each employee for at least one shift to see if they were either miscalculating or outright stealing, but we never found any hard evidence to nail anyone. Then one day, one of the new kids showed up for work on my shift, and was about to leave when the phone rang. The boss said "You need to leave, and XXX is taking your place. You already know why". I found out later through a mutual acquaintance that he suspected me of some type of "hacking" endeavour to fudge the cash totals, based on the fact that I'm a computer god. Of course, even after my departure, money still went missing on a daily basis, and he eventually fired everyone and started over with all new people. I showed up to gloat a few weeks later, and the boss still complained that he didn't trust his staff.
Years later, I found out it was the boss' own son who was stealing from the business. Being in Canada, I never really contemplated suing but it certainly shows how much damage can be done from an "unofficial" accusation. Despite working there for three years, and previously getting along fine with the boss, I could never use him as a work reference. I'm sure that hurt me back in those years when I was looking for a new job, as I was young and it would have been a strong reference were it not for that load of bull.
Excellent rebuttal! :) Still I find it difficult to grasp why something like Lina would be better than just directly releasing compatibility libraries for various platforms. What's the benefit of the extra level of indirection ? Instead of going GTK -> Lina -> Win32GUI, why not immediately go from GTK to Win32 ?
From another perspective, why couldn't we just have compilers for various language that output Java bytecode ? The level of effort required for porting seems the same either way, only we wouldn't have to invent yet another virtual machine.
Sounds about right, except nobody posted anything meaty, like making massive edits to the PHP code base to strip out fluff, or implementing an interpreter-level cache that encapsulates multiple script invocations into one persistent execution, or just buying more friggin hardware :)
10. Develop multiple-posting disorder and build a second website to make TWICE AS MUCH MONEY!
I'd never claim to be an everyman, but I broke 2TB on my desktop three years ago with a huge pile of SATA drives and a couple extra controller cards. Besides, chicks dig the little side-cart full of hard drives :) I just took a couple of four-slot drive cages from cheap PC cases and built them into an enclosure, complete with its own ATX power supply.
:)
Of course that was before I jumped onto the NAS storage cash cow, doing pretty much exactly what the article poster wrote, only I turned around and sold my PC-based NAS boxes for about half the price of "enterprise" solutions, which still represents a 400% markup for me
You have to realize, the companies and people building these overpriced RAID arrays are just your average greedy bastard, usually no smarter or more skilled than any other geek. Most of the computer-attached devices today are little more than an XScale processor, a tiny bit of RAM and Linux. Broadband routers, NAS boxes, KVM/IP switches, "smart" network adapters, heck I wouldn't be surprised to find home entertainment devices running Linux. We're in the age of mashups, where any idiot with a marketing budget can slap various I/O ports on a board and "invent" appliances.
As everyone else pointed out, XBMC is for the original Xbox. I've been using it for years, and I absolutely love it. I use it to stream videos from a Samba server, which is how I can leave my DVDs in a storage locker while still having access to 450+ movies without getting my fat ass off the couch. It also handles music and photos, though I've never used the photo features but I do occasionally play Shoutcast streams with it on the big stereo.
One of the nice things about XBMC is its skinning capabilities. It has had Mac-like style and flair for years, making PC-based media players look old and boring. Considering that XBoxes can be found for less than $100 including a remote, it's cheaper and more reliable than any half-decent DivX-enabled DVD player. Even 720p high-def plays fine with most source formats, and plays smoothly on the puny little CPU since most of the video processing is done by the GPU.
I often find myself wondering why most internet standards are so complex in the first place. Let's face it: DNS looks up a name in a database and spits out a number. It's like a phone book for the internet (white pages, that is). So then, why the hell is it such a pain to configure with its weird-ass zone files that half the world seems to struggle with, and obscure vulnerabilities like cache poisoning. Why can't it be as simple as "domain = IP" or "I don't know, but server X might" because that's basically what's going on, only it's buried under a pile of nerd filth that all but its originators truly grok.
Here's one big pain in the butt: listing name servers for a domain. Why the hell don't we use IP addresses for those ? Instead you have a chicken and egg situation where you would need to contact ns1.something.tld to ask about its own address, so instead we cheat with "hints" in the parent server's records and end up listing the IP anyway, making the nameserver's name redundant. Things like that make me wonder what the designers were smoking that day. In the end, it's all just a big relational database, only the tables are each stored on different hosts but the links work the same way, so why the big headache ?
The problem with this scenario is that the court system is inefficient and drawn out. For the average working person with a life, where you have to miss work to show up in court, it's easier to just pay the stupid little fee and go on with your functional life. It would certainly be more satisfying to hold out until justice is truly served (and then hire someone to put the widow out of her misery), but in this case she paid $85 to make this cascade of insult and injury go away.
To me, that right there is more than sufficient proof to show that the system is failing the very people it's supposed to protect. It's one thing to grieve the loss of a spouse, but it certainly doesn't give someone a hall pass to skip out on the rules of society. The whole legal system and constitution were originally intended to ensure the stability and sustainability of a nation, to weed out the bad apples and protect those who make the world go round. A widowed space cadet who can't even wrap her worried head around such basic things as auto insurance and safety, I have no respect nor pity for her. If my spouse were to suddenly die, am I expected to just give up on life and cease to be a functional member of society ? I'm sorry, but I just don't see myself trawling about the city like a lost soul, not now at age 27, and not when I'm 67 either. I certainly wouldn't want to be dragging others down into a spiral of loathing and deceit like the fireman's widow did.
We need to rethink the way the game is played. Decades of corruption on all levels is quickly leading the civilized world into chaos and defeat. We don't worry about global warming and overpopulation because deep down, we all know we'll end up killing each other long before mother nature does.
WoW is a nice cheap drug. You click a few things, do some easy quests and you get a reward every few minutes. You don't have to worry about conspiracies, the worst you may need to contend with is your guildmates whining that locks and BE are OP, but that's what /gkick is for :)
My opinion about hidden configs is that if they were meant for the end-user to dick with, they'd be on a friendly Options dialog.
If there's a very useful hidden option, it should be promoted to a visible widget. The fact that Firefox devs are often lazy about such "little" things is the main source of problems. They spend too much time building flashy (and useless) features instead of tightening the existing experience, which is why you see a new FF 3.0 attention-grab every couple of days. They've gone completely Microsoft!
I think they mean PC RPGs like the Elder Scrolls series, which play like a very unpopular MMO ;) The kind of game where you spend more time designing your character than actually playing. Story-based RPGs (Final Fantasy and the like) are an entirely different affair, as they play like an interactive story.
One main difference is the PC-style RPG has somewhat higher replay value, as you probably didn't discover everything on the first run. On the other hand, Final Fantasy is so long and linear that you'll be selling it minutes after you beat it, because you really don't want to sit through all those long emo cutscenes again, but you probably enjoyed discovering it the the first time through.
I don't really think single-player RPGs should worry about MMOs all that much. Many MMO players enjoy the team aspect, forming guilds and pursuing massive raids with their virtual brothers. The actual role playing is just a vehicle for social interaction, most people being obsessed with gaining levels and looting better gear. Single-player RPGs tend to be more cerebral (or less cheesy).
Comparing RPGs to MMOs is kind of like saying Tetrinet vs Gameboy... different playing style, different end users.
Reading this slashvertisement has left me wondering what the hell these Israelis were trying to solve in the first place.
It's a USB device (not a USB key, dammit!) that merely houses an embedded processor, with funky drivers that mess with the network stack in order to route traffic through the gadget. You're piping your 100mbit line both ways over USB, which is such a dumb idea. It offloads the firewall process from your main CPU, but then ties it up waiting on USB I/O. It also raises the same issue as VM firewalls, where attackers are still connecting directly to your PC, you're just blindly hoping that the "raw" hop between the interface itself and the firewall won't be compromised.
This is hardly any different from running a pure software firewall like Zone Alarm or whatever's big these days. Adding a puny little embedded processor doesn't do all that much. If you worry about your idle CPU cycles so much that you'd throw $180 at a silly gadget like this, then I can think of several other options that are less hackish and platform-agnostic.
1. Spend that $180 to get a faster CPU, mitigating the performance hit of a software firewall
2. Buy/find an old Pentium-133 for ten bucks and install a Linux firewall (even a prebuilt one like SmoothWall)
3. Go to Worst Buy, Jerkit City or Mallwart and buy a $30 broadband router
4. Unplug your computer, bury it in 6 feet of concrete, post an armed guard nearby and find yourself a less stressful hobby
To combat illiteracy, I think we should exclusively confine all life-saving information to printed material. Don't tell kids not to jump in front of speeding vehicles, or poke themselves in the face with sharp knives, or leap off tall buildings... keep that information in books. Give it a few years, and illiteracy will be a think of the past, since all the dumb kids will be dead :)
How to build a huge mp3 collection:
1. Launch company that stores users' music online
2. Users send you all their music
3. W00T! check out my huge crappy mp3 collection.
I haven't figured out where to put "Profit" in there. I guess that's because I'm Canadian.
Perhaps if they were copies of copyrighted or illegal documents :P
This isn't about moving your physical products to a storage area, it's about storing a COPY.
I don't care if the Chinese gov't wants to go to cyberwar with the US. Just keep their idiot script kiddies off my subnet. I already block most of China and Korea at the router, which sucks for the potentially good people over there but I really don't need a thousand different brute-force SSH attacks per day. Within a week of a new server being online, I had auto-blocked 13 thousand IPs which was seriously bogging down the system, so I just nullrouted the subnets altogether.
Gah you kids and your puny little tricks... back in the good old days, if a friend was too drunk to drive, we'd tackle him, steal his keys and drive the car 8 hours north to Sudbury and sell it to some Canadian redneck for more beer money. By the time we bussed back home we'd be ready to drink again :)
Too late, Iraq already knows the earth is flat, the curvature is just a lens effect from outer space. Osama is going to bring Mars down and use it like a fly swatter to squish us all.
DOOMED!
Well now thanks for that wealth of information. It runs Linux, and Linux applications, then translates QT and GTK function calls into the host OS' equivalent GUI API through some kind of "fourth wall" tunnel. The idea I guess, is that people will run Windows/Mac as their primary OS, then run Linux apps through Lina to make them appear "natively" on their desktop in a clipping frame, much like Parallels Coherence does on the Mac.
As much as I like Linux and open-source, this just sounds like a hopeless idea. People want to run Windows apps on Linux (wine), not the other way around. Let's face it, most graphical OSS software packages are clones of original Windows or Mac apps. The few cool Linux GUI apps that matter usually get ported to Win32 anyway, making this whole VM exercise pointless.
I certainly agree with you about information overload. I often times find myself way over my head when all I need is an intro to some topic. This article is neither overloading nor introductory, and I think my biggest problem is that it misses the mark with regards to its target audience. It's offering these horribly basic configuration "tips" that would normally be the first thing a server admin would do, but trying to present them as "performance tips" is complete disinformation. I think the kind of readership on /. and IBM's tech blog would have wanted some nitty gritty on some new tricks to squeeze even more juice out of our already-tuned setups, like the very popular Lighttpd article I linked in my previous comment.
If it had been titled "How to properly configure your LAMP stack", I would probably have been ok with it. Actually I would have ignored it completely because such things are trivial to me. Calling them performance tips is unnecessary hype. What if it were about auto maintenance, titled "Optimize your engine and make your car go faster" when it was just a PSA about changing your oil regularly and checking your tire pressure ? My gripe is simply that this article claims to be something it's not. The information contained within is still accurate and valuable to some, that's something I can't deny.