As someone who used to play Guitar Hero weekly with a few friends at our dorky bar, we got a lot of those whiners. The most commonly heard criticism was "if you have time to play that stupid thing, you have time to take guitar lessons". And then we'd politely tell the craggy old hippie to go fuck himself.
Sure, we could all have stayed home and practiced guitar until our fingers were reduced to bloody stumps, but that's beside the point. The interaction with the game was merely an excuse to hang out with a bunch of new people. Were it not for that "stupid game", I would not be running an indie label today, and I probably wouldn't be taking actual guitar lessons either, because I would not have met any of the like-minded people that have made these things possible for me. Formal music school was never my bag, I've tried it enough times to know that much. I discovered a bunch of local musicians, they discovered my tech geekdom, and before we knew it, we were forging solid relationships and combining our skills to further each other's goals.
Now, back to the topic: I think Code Hero is an interesting idea. I'm not sure I dig the FPS concept so much, but I find the prospect of learning real game programming in convenient little bite-sized pieces extremely appealing. This is like a giant version of those sandbox projects we all create when we're testing out a new idea, only better. It's like setting a breakpoint in your IDE, then changing the code on-the-fly, without having to recompile and relaunch the process. Fifteen years ago, I created something similar to help me figure out 3D texturing (in software). Being able to tweak and test your code in real-time and see immediate results is invaluable, especially when learning something new.
How can you hit 420 Mbps and still diss Gigabit ? 420 Mbps is greater than 100 Mbps, and we don't have a standard for 0.42 Gigabit networks. Chances are, the throughput was limited by disk I/O or even motherboard bandwidth to the port, as laptops often have to sacrifice performance in favour of size and power conservation.
If I had a gigabit pipe to the internet today, I probably would use about 30% more bandwidth than I currently do - which is already quite a bit - but I would enjoy the experience a lot more since I'd spend much less time waiting for transfers to complete. I could mount remote filesystems over the wire without suffering through long pauses due to FS overhead. I wouldn't need such a beefy laptop to do my work, because I could comfortably remote into my desktop powerhouse at home. I could fling media projects around without having to wait a half-hour per file, fostering real-time collaboration with my teammates.
So we may not need gigabit networks yet, but we'd be fools to turn them down. If the computer industry had been built around needs, we would not have personal computers today, because at the time, nobody needed an Apple II. We wanted them, because they were cool, and then we discovered new uses for the tech.
I'm actually in the business of building and selling white-box NAS boxes that replicate over the wire, but it sounds like you don't need a $10k rack server with 40+ terabytes. However, at the desktop end of the spectrum, I highly recommend Synology DiskStation products. They support offsite backups and will happily converse with Win/Mac/Lin. The GUI is a bit overkill IMO, but it works and it's fairly easy to use, which is more than I can say about my own products:P
Under the hood, almost all of these boxes use rsync, so if you want to mess with different port numbers, you'll have to handle that mapping at your firewall/gateway.
It's called a retirement plan. Just because employers traditionally included this as a perk, does not mean you "continue to get paid for the work you're doing now". Artists, contractors, small business owners - they all have to arrange for their own retirement savings, and if they don't, well, they're going to live a spartan life the day they stop working.
If a chimney sweep didn't save up for retirement, and suddenly realized no one needs chimney sweeps anymore, what would they do ? Jump off a bridge ? No, they'd adapt. They'd choose another career and roll with it.
Some of us don't plan on retiring. I'm both a (crappy) musician and an I.T. contractor, so in theory I'm doubly fucked, but even when into my 60s and 70s, I'll still be able to do at least one of those things, probably for a decent amount of money too. And if not, I'll adapt! If I can't play music, then I might teach or tutor. If nobody has a need for a sysadmin, fine I'll learn the programming-fad-of-the-month and sell that. Hell, if I have no saleable skills anymore, i'll learn new ones. If my very old-timey father can learn to use a computer at age 60, then I'm sure I'll be able to rub enough IQ together to show the new kids a trick or two.
Musicians don't need life-long copyright extortion, they just need to get off their ego pedestals and get back to work. Just because you can string a I-IV-V chord progression together doesn't mean you and your hellspawn should be independently wealthy for the rest of eternity.
What we don't like are the long waiting lists for some surgeries, and in general the unreasonably long ER waiting times. Some affluent people do choose to go stateside and pay for their surgery in order to bypass the waiting list.
One thing that does suck is we don't have enough doctors to go around. I'm not too sure what's up with that, but it is one of the main causes of those long ER delays. In big cities it's not uncommon to wait 4-6 hours for an emergency consult, unless you roll in on an ambulance with a severed limb... Family doctors are also very scarce. I perceive that as a government failure, they're not providing enough incentives for people to suffer through med school. More family doctors = more early prevention = less burden on the hospitals, but since when has any politician bothered with the long term outlook ?
We still have group health insurance, but that's mostly to cover little extras like dental, eyecare and prescriptions, along with certain hospital upgrades - you get a shared room by default, or you can pay extra for a private or semi-private room. Sometimes this privatization works in the patient's favour, sometimes it results in massive industry wide insurance fraud and price fixing. Dental in particular is egregious, as dentists have been steadily hiking their prices to max out everyone's yearly coverage - or else the remainder is "wasted":P. The last time I went for a cleaning and X-rays, two visits used up $2500 in insurance! Needless to say, I didn't go back to that scammer... but it is a growing trend as the only oversight comes from the dentists' association itself. Self-regulation ? Yeah right!
Eyecare is much more competitive, partly because there are more eye doctors, and also because you can get many basic services in pharmacies and at Costco very cheaply. The specialists focus on edge cases and LASIK surgery, which is not covered by the government nor most private insurance plans. We don't have as much bait-and-switch crap as you cowboys with your $99 LASIK (and $1200 add-ons), I think the latest price was around $400-500 per eye for most cases - about the same as a mid-range pair of eyeglasses so quite affordable.
Despite the criticisms, we're decently healthy and I think most people have good faith in the health system. It has its shortcomings, but the lack of up-front financial niggling means people are more likely to step up when someone is in need. We also don't end up suing each other over medical bills, and for the few cases where we do, it's usually handled by our auto insurance to cover lost wages and incidental costs - not the hospital visit! Less middlemen = more efficiency.
There is no system that can please everyone, but from what I understand of the U.S. healthcare situation, even a shitty "Single Payer" system would be better than none at all. For one, it would take power away from the private insurance companies, who seem to boss patients and hospital staff around like their bitches. It would also eliminate the situation where your insurance suddenly drops you on a technicality (read: because you're unprofitable). This doesn't mean you can't still have private clinics and hospitals if you have the cash, but these would have to go well above and beyond the current standard of quality. That seems like a good thing: decent care for everyone, faster/luxurious care if you're filthy rich... either that, or they will fly to some foreign country and pay their doctors, as is already done EN-MASSE!
It should also be pointed out that getting a standard American plug into a 220V socket is the next best thing to impossible. It certainly wasn't done without some work on your dad's part....
You've clearly never been to Europe, or only in some relatively high-end areas. A lot of places have "american-style " NEMA 15-5 plugs, or even the older 2-prong style, but with 220-240V. The farther east you go, the more common this is. People use them with adaptors like it's part of the damn outlet.
Electrical weirdness is quite commonplace, especially in impoverished areas.
Say what you will about financial motivation, but for-profit healthcare is a morally bankrupt and ultimately self-defeating strategy. I'm fine with the doctors and professionals getting paid, everyone needs a job, but these people should not be greedy middlemen in the sales industry. They're not "adding value", they're double-dipping.
The problem is that a hard drive "batch" isn't really a batch at all, it's an entire production run from any particular facility. Typically, once you break into a new "batch", the drives have other differences like a cost-reduced controller or different platter density, that makes it unsuitable for integration with the existing array.
The most defining indicator I've seen for hard drives is simply its inception date. If you take a bunch of drives, start pounding them in a RAID simultaneously, they are a little more likely to fail in groups, e.g. if you hit a common defect that triggers after n power-on hours. If you mix new and nearly-new drives in an array, that's less likely to happen.
Been there. Done that. Criticizing what I experienced firsthand. But thanks for playing...
Some of the stuff is amazing, like the massive wire structures and what I can only term "functional art" like the ones you can climb into/onto. Then everything else is indeed tired out hippie/raver crap and countless naked poi enthusiasts. I find the event attracts a handful of narrow niches of people that quickly get repetitive and irritating. Sure, after a day or two you settle in with a few like-minded participants, but it's no different than that one could achieve at city bars, galleries and shared spaces year-round.
Cool people will gravitate toward each other, regardless of setting.
And then crappy people will latch onto those cool people like lint.
If you mean me, on my corporate network, then I cordially invite that person to go fuck themselves all day long because I'll be all-too happy to recommend termination.
To anyone actually peddling porn,.xxx should be a proud statement. "YES! We have porn here! Come and git it!"
I'm not saying it should be mandatory, but it's kind of like a red-light district. Self identification. That's a good thing. If that results in easy filtering, then so be it. I would much rather make it easy for my fellow sysadmin to block.xxx where it is clearly not appropriate, like office networks and kids' computers. Kids don't have credit cards, and well the office jerker is a creep, I wouldn't want to be working in the next cubicle while Mr I-Hate-My-Job is having a session.
DISCLAIMER: I used to run paysites and freesites to promote the former. Well, okay, I still do so on a maintenance basis.
Why would that kill your income ? If content is legitimately "unsafe", it should be tagged as such. Hell I think porn sites would voluntarily self-declare as unsafe, because then if someone goes through the extra 2 clicks to turn off the safe filter, it's a golden invitation to open the floodgates and show them adult content, which they've now officially indicated they want.
I think.xxx is a good idea. I even think it should have its own dedicated search engine, google.xxx! Seriously, if someone says they want porn, give it to them! You cannot ask for better targeting than that.
I question that. Reputable porn sites usually want to help with filtering. Why shove your content down someone's throat if they aren't receptive to it in the first place ? Throwing off random porn results while I'm doing a screencast in front of a client is NOT going to get that site a sale. On the other hand, if someone explicitly indicates that they want porn, I say open the floodgates!
The question is: Did they get permission to use that camera from the Burning Man officials ?
Look, I like the root idea of BM, the whole transient art-city-building concept, but the net result is always a bunch of hippies acting friggin' weird. And the money, ZOMG the money - both to get a ticket (which buys you fuckall), and the effort and resources spent to build art installations - only to be torn down a week later. Why can't they just build a permanent hippie city somewhere so they can live the way they want to live, do their silly little spirit dances and make love to Gaia or whatever, and we indoctrinated modernists can visit once in a while and bring them toilet paper.
And then we'll get satellites to take ho-hum pictures of it from SPAAAAAACE!
Even the 750k MTBF feels bogus. In my experience actual failure rate is just a hair under 3%, which works out to about 300k MTBF. Maybe they're quoting the MTBF of a drive still in its anti-static bag, sitting in the spares drawer:)
Try shoving 36 3TB drives in one of these: http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E26-R1400LP.cfm and you'll appreciate MTBF in a whole new light. My approach is simple: I take the number of drives, times 3% annual failure, times the number of years I want to keep that box in operation. The result is how many spares I'll need. For the 36-drive box, I use 32 drives for the RAID + hot spares, and leave the remaining 4 as spun-down spares. That ensures at least 5 years of hassle-free operation. Add JBODs to the mix and you get an even smoother curve, as a 100-drive array is more deterministic in its failures due to the larger sample size.
For a single drive, well, failure rate becomes a lottery. MTBF won't help you here. If you buy a 3TB drive for your desktop, you should also get a 3TB external drive to back it up, and sync them regularly. Always assume one of them will die at the time you need it the most, and be prepared to deal with it gracefully. The odds of both failing at the same time are pretty slim, certainly slim enough for most residential users.
I don't think anyone in their right mind will want to run WP7 anyway. Certainly not if they have something slightly less shit like a late-model Android.
Ok fine, the Unix part is tolerable. The subtle differences between BSD and Linux versions of many core tools drives me foolish, but at least they're there.
But the GUI part... good god, it's so lacking in keyboard accessibility compared to Windows and KDE. As a coder it drives me foolish, particularly on a laptop.
Does Marvell do anything right ? I know their network interfaces are pretty dodgy, as were their SATA 2.0 kludges.
They know they're a shit company, which is why they rush things to market. Think of all the asian motherboard and add-on manufacturers that are dying to be the first to stick another starburst buzzword on their shiny boxes. Marvell released a shit product a few months before the good ones came out, so they sold millions of chips.
If the manufacturers had any standard of quality, we wouldn't have bottom feeders like Marvell, VIA, Broadcom and friends. Like all other things made in China, it's a race to the bottom. Why should we expect otherwise, when their time is so cheap compared to ours ? If I lose a month's work due to corruption, I'm out a good $5k. If they lose a month's work... well they lost less than the cost of the board.
When companies throw around billions of dollars on mere whims, that to me is proof that our financial model is obsolete. These corporations wield far too much power and influence and should be broken up.
Does the fact that Oracle is a 40 billion dollar company result in better products ? No. Ask any Oracle admin.
All it does it give them the power to bully everyone else around until there is nothing left. They gobbled up Sun. They chugged MySQL. They bought John Ashcroft (not that this was any challenge). To outsiders, Oracle is an example of everything that's wrong with America. They take and take, and they never give back.
Here is, IMO, the most telling line in the article:
just because Apple has a runaway success on its hands, they cannot charge Apple prices for their hastily developed me-too products
And that is exactly how I feel. Don't get me wrong, I've been a PC guy since kindergarten, and while I do own a few Apple products, it is largely because I get paid to develop apps. I still hate OSX and IOS for being so restrictive and toy-like, but the one thing I can't take away from Apple is that when they put out an idea, they run with it. Everyone else sees dollar signs and rushes to copy what they see, which is like those bums on the street selling fake Rolexes. They all fail to appreciate what truly makes the iPad unique: it's idiot-proof! The other two tablets suffer from their PC ancestry: too many stupid goddamned apps and knobs and tweaks that should not be necessary on such a limited-usage device. Fire up a brand new iPad and you have about a dozen apps on the home screen. Fire up a brand new Android and that app menu is over 50 icons long. It's overwhelming, and most people will never use about 48 of those 50 apps:P
The impression I get is that the Android and Blackberry folks don't give two shits about interface design and usability. If these things have been put through user testing, they need to replace those useless users because there is no way in hell my mother would feel comfortable with one of their devices. Heck, it took me a few minutes just to figure out how to get Angry Birds on the wife's Android. But the iPad ? I just handed it to her, told her that "Safari is the internet" and off she went. Now she has every goddamned Popcap game under the sun installed, with no further interaction from me. That says a lot about how little thought went into the knockoff products.
Did the attack take place over the internet ? Or was an android used to execute the attacks ? No ? Then it is NOT cybercrime. It's not cyber-anything!
This was a meatspace attack, the kind any 12 year old can perform with a card cloner - you know, a small, simple electronic device consisting of about $15 worth of components and a few hundred bytes of PIC code. I figure all they did was run the same cards simultaneously at different ATMs, exploiting a probably very huge gaping race condition in the bank's software. More importantly, I wouldn't be surprised if many other banks were also vulnerable to this type of attack, with no intentions to fix it. The only reason we don't hear about it more often is because most of us in the western world don't have dozens of sketchy friends with the nerves to coordinate this sort of attack yet still remain trustworthy. We also tend to have more to lose from getting caught, than the few thousand dollars gained in a successful attack. Is it worth risking a criminal record and incarceration for the sake of a year's salary ? For most of us the answer is no. We aren't criminals, not because we're "good people", but because it is simply not worth the risk. If the take were larger by an order of magnitude, you'll find allegedly honest people are suddenly far more interested in taking that risk.
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As someone who used to play Guitar Hero weekly with a few friends at our dorky bar, we got a lot of those whiners. The most commonly heard criticism was "if you have time to play that stupid thing, you have time to take guitar lessons". And then we'd politely tell the craggy old hippie to go fuck himself.
Sure, we could all have stayed home and practiced guitar until our fingers were reduced to bloody stumps, but that's beside the point. The interaction with the game was merely an excuse to hang out with a bunch of new people. Were it not for that "stupid game", I would not be running an indie label today, and I probably wouldn't be taking actual guitar lessons either, because I would not have met any of the like-minded people that have made these things possible for me. Formal music school was never my bag, I've tried it enough times to know that much. I discovered a bunch of local musicians, they discovered my tech geekdom, and before we knew it, we were forging solid relationships and combining our skills to further each other's goals.
Now, back to the topic: I think Code Hero is an interesting idea. I'm not sure I dig the FPS concept so much, but I find the prospect of learning real game programming in convenient little bite-sized pieces extremely appealing. This is like a giant version of those sandbox projects we all create when we're testing out a new idea, only better. It's like setting a breakpoint in your IDE, then changing the code on-the-fly, without having to recompile and relaunch the process. Fifteen years ago, I created something similar to help me figure out 3D texturing (in software). Being able to tweak and test your code in real-time and see immediate results is invaluable, especially when learning something new.
I'd say Ken's Labyrinth.
How can you hit 420 Mbps and still diss Gigabit ? 420 Mbps is greater than 100 Mbps, and we don't have a standard for 0.42 Gigabit networks. Chances are, the throughput was limited by disk I/O or even motherboard bandwidth to the port, as laptops often have to sacrifice performance in favour of size and power conservation.
If I had a gigabit pipe to the internet today, I probably would use about 30% more bandwidth than I currently do - which is already quite a bit - but I would enjoy the experience a lot more since I'd spend much less time waiting for transfers to complete. I could mount remote filesystems over the wire without suffering through long pauses due to FS overhead. I wouldn't need such a beefy laptop to do my work, because I could comfortably remote into my desktop powerhouse at home. I could fling media projects around without having to wait a half-hour per file, fostering real-time collaboration with my teammates.
So we may not need gigabit networks yet, but we'd be fools to turn them down. If the computer industry had been built around needs, we would not have personal computers today, because at the time, nobody needed an Apple II. We wanted them, because they were cool, and then we discovered new uses for the tech.
I'm actually in the business of building and selling white-box NAS boxes that replicate over the wire, but it sounds like you don't need a $10k rack server with 40+ terabytes. However, at the desktop end of the spectrum, I highly recommend Synology DiskStation products. They support offsite backups and will happily converse with Win/Mac/Lin. The GUI is a bit overkill IMO, but it works and it's fairly easy to use, which is more than I can say about my own products :P
Under the hood, almost all of these boxes use rsync, so if you want to mess with different port numbers, you'll have to handle that mapping at your firewall/gateway.
On what, the color cyan ? The Helvetica font ? The blobby rendition of Tux ?
If they have any humanity left in them, they will chuckle as we did, and realize 3.2 will probably be released in another two weeks anyway.
It's called a retirement plan. Just because employers traditionally included this as a perk, does not mean you "continue to get paid for the work you're doing now". Artists, contractors, small business owners - they all have to arrange for their own retirement savings, and if they don't, well, they're going to live a spartan life the day they stop working.
If a chimney sweep didn't save up for retirement, and suddenly realized no one needs chimney sweeps anymore, what would they do ? Jump off a bridge ? No, they'd adapt. They'd choose another career and roll with it.
Some of us don't plan on retiring. I'm both a (crappy) musician and an I.T. contractor, so in theory I'm doubly fucked, but even when into my 60s and 70s, I'll still be able to do at least one of those things, probably for a decent amount of money too. And if not, I'll adapt! If I can't play music, then I might teach or tutor. If nobody has a need for a sysadmin, fine I'll learn the programming-fad-of-the-month and sell that. Hell, if I have no saleable skills anymore, i'll learn new ones. If my very old-timey father can learn to use a computer at age 60, then I'm sure I'll be able to rub enough IQ together to show the new kids a trick or two.
Musicians don't need life-long copyright extortion, they just need to get off their ego pedestals and get back to work. Just because you can string a I-IV-V chord progression together doesn't mean you and your hellspawn should be independently wealthy for the rest of eternity.
What we don't like are the long waiting lists for some surgeries, and in general the unreasonably long ER waiting times. Some affluent people do choose to go stateside and pay for their surgery in order to bypass the waiting list.
One thing that does suck is we don't have enough doctors to go around. I'm not too sure what's up with that, but it is one of the main causes of those long ER delays. In big cities it's not uncommon to wait 4-6 hours for an emergency consult, unless you roll in on an ambulance with a severed limb... Family doctors are also very scarce. I perceive that as a government failure, they're not providing enough incentives for people to suffer through med school. More family doctors = more early prevention = less burden on the hospitals, but since when has any politician bothered with the long term outlook ?
We still have group health insurance, but that's mostly to cover little extras like dental, eyecare and prescriptions, along with certain hospital upgrades - you get a shared room by default, or you can pay extra for a private or semi-private room. Sometimes this privatization works in the patient's favour, sometimes it results in massive industry wide insurance fraud and price fixing. Dental in particular is egregious, as dentists have been steadily hiking their prices to max out everyone's yearly coverage - or else the remainder is "wasted" :P. The last time I went for a cleaning and X-rays, two visits used up $2500 in insurance! Needless to say, I didn't go back to that scammer... but it is a growing trend as the only oversight comes from the dentists' association itself. Self-regulation ? Yeah right!
Eyecare is much more competitive, partly because there are more eye doctors, and also because you can get many basic services in pharmacies and at Costco very cheaply. The specialists focus on edge cases and LASIK surgery, which is not covered by the government nor most private insurance plans. We don't have as much bait-and-switch crap as you cowboys with your $99 LASIK (and $1200 add-ons), I think the latest price was around $400-500 per eye for most cases - about the same as a mid-range pair of eyeglasses so quite affordable.
Despite the criticisms, we're decently healthy and I think most people have good faith in the health system. It has its shortcomings, but the lack of up-front financial niggling means people are more likely to step up when someone is in need. We also don't end up suing each other over medical bills, and for the few cases where we do, it's usually handled by our auto insurance to cover lost wages and incidental costs - not the hospital visit! Less middlemen = more efficiency.
There is no system that can please everyone, but from what I understand of the U.S. healthcare situation, even a shitty "Single Payer" system would be better than none at all. For one, it would take power away from the private insurance companies, who seem to boss patients and hospital staff around like their bitches. It would also eliminate the situation where your insurance suddenly drops you on a technicality (read: because you're unprofitable). This doesn't mean you can't still have private clinics and hospitals if you have the cash, but these would have to go well above and beyond the current standard of quality. That seems like a good thing: decent care for everyone, faster/luxurious care if you're filthy rich... either that, or they will fly to some foreign country and pay their doctors, as is already done EN-MASSE!
It should also be pointed out that getting a standard American plug into a 220V socket is the next best thing to impossible. It certainly wasn't done without some work on your dad's part....
You've clearly never been to Europe, or only in some relatively high-end areas. A lot of places have "american-style " NEMA 15-5 plugs, or even the older 2-prong style, but with 220-240V. The farther east you go, the more common this is. People use them with adaptors like it's part of the damn outlet.
Electrical weirdness is quite commonplace, especially in impoverished areas.
This.
Say what you will about financial motivation, but for-profit healthcare is a morally bankrupt and ultimately self-defeating strategy. I'm fine with the doctors and professionals getting paid, everyone needs a job, but these people should not be greedy middlemen in the sales industry. They're not "adding value", they're double-dipping.
Screw metal plates, I'm getting a faraday cage installed into (in lieu of) my skull!
The problem is that a hard drive "batch" isn't really a batch at all, it's an entire production run from any particular facility. Typically, once you break into a new "batch", the drives have other differences like a cost-reduced controller or different platter density, that makes it unsuitable for integration with the existing array.
The most defining indicator I've seen for hard drives is simply its inception date. If you take a bunch of drives, start pounding them in a RAID simultaneously, they are a little more likely to fail in groups, e.g. if you hit a common defect that triggers after n power-on hours. If you mix new and nearly-new drives in an array, that's less likely to happen.
Been there. Done that. Criticizing what I experienced firsthand. But thanks for playing...
Some of the stuff is amazing, like the massive wire structures and what I can only term "functional art" like the ones you can climb into/onto. Then everything else is indeed tired out hippie/raver crap and countless naked poi enthusiasts. I find the event attracts a handful of narrow niches of people that quickly get repetitive and irritating. Sure, after a day or two you settle in with a few like-minded participants, but it's no different than that one could achieve at city bars, galleries and shared spaces year-round.
Cool people will gravitate toward each other, regardless of setting.
And then crappy people will latch onto those cool people like lint.
If you mean the ISP, then it is a legal matter.
If you mean me, on my corporate network, then I cordially invite that person to go fuck themselves all day long because I'll be all-too happy to recommend termination.
alt.binaries.nospam.anonymous-coward.nudes.flonk.flonk.flonk ?
The problem is people create a problem out of it.
To anyone actually peddling porn, .xxx should be a proud statement. "YES! We have porn here! Come and git it!"
I'm not saying it should be mandatory, but it's kind of like a red-light district. Self identification. That's a good thing. If that results in easy filtering, then so be it. I would much rather make it easy for my fellow sysadmin to block .xxx where it is clearly not appropriate, like office networks and kids' computers. Kids don't have credit cards, and well the office jerker is a creep, I wouldn't want to be working in the next cubicle while Mr I-Hate-My-Job is having a session.
DISCLAIMER: I used to run paysites and freesites to promote the former. Well, okay, I still do so on a maintenance basis.
Why would that kill your income ? If content is legitimately "unsafe", it should be tagged as such. Hell I think porn sites would voluntarily self-declare as unsafe, because then if someone goes through the extra 2 clicks to turn off the safe filter, it's a golden invitation to open the floodgates and show them adult content, which they've now officially indicated they want.
I think .xxx is a good idea. I even think it should have its own dedicated search engine, google.xxx! Seriously, if someone says they want porn, give it to them! You cannot ask for better targeting than that.
I question that. Reputable porn sites usually want to help with filtering. Why shove your content down someone's throat if they aren't receptive to it in the first place ? Throwing off random porn results while I'm doing a screencast in front of a client is NOT going to get that site a sale. On the other hand, if someone explicitly indicates that they want porn, I say open the floodgates!
The question is: Did they get permission to use that camera from the Burning Man officials ?
Look, I like the root idea of BM, the whole transient art-city-building concept, but the net result is always a bunch of hippies acting friggin' weird. And the money, ZOMG the money - both to get a ticket (which buys you fuckall), and the effort and resources spent to build art installations - only to be torn down a week later. Why can't they just build a permanent hippie city somewhere so they can live the way they want to live, do their silly little spirit dances and make love to Gaia or whatever, and we indoctrinated modernists can visit once in a while and bring them toilet paper.
And then we'll get satellites to take ho-hum pictures of it from SPAAAAAACE!
Even the 750k MTBF feels bogus. In my experience actual failure rate is just a hair under 3%, which works out to about 300k MTBF. Maybe they're quoting the MTBF of a drive still in its anti-static bag, sitting in the spares drawer :)
Try shoving 36 3TB drives in one of these: http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E26-R1400LP.cfm and you'll appreciate MTBF in a whole new light. My approach is simple: I take the number of drives, times 3% annual failure, times the number of years I want to keep that box in operation. The result is how many spares I'll need. For the 36-drive box, I use 32 drives for the RAID + hot spares, and leave the remaining 4 as spun-down spares. That ensures at least 5 years of hassle-free operation. Add JBODs to the mix and you get an even smoother curve, as a 100-drive array is more deterministic in its failures due to the larger sample size.
For a single drive, well, failure rate becomes a lottery. MTBF won't help you here. If you buy a 3TB drive for your desktop, you should also get a 3TB external drive to back it up, and sync them regularly. Always assume one of them will die at the time you need it the most, and be prepared to deal with it gracefully. The odds of both failing at the same time are pretty slim, certainly slim enough for most residential users.
I don't think anyone in their right mind will want to run WP7 anyway. Certainly not if they have something slightly less shit like a late-model Android.
Ok fine, the Unix part is tolerable. The subtle differences between BSD and Linux versions of many core tools drives me foolish, but at least they're there.
But the GUI part... good god, it's so lacking in keyboard accessibility compared to Windows and KDE. As a coder it drives me foolish, particularly on a laptop.
Does Marvell do anything right ? I know their network interfaces are pretty dodgy, as were their SATA 2.0 kludges.
They know they're a shit company, which is why they rush things to market. Think of all the asian motherboard and add-on manufacturers that are dying to be the first to stick another starburst buzzword on their shiny boxes. Marvell released a shit product a few months before the good ones came out, so they sold millions of chips.
If the manufacturers had any standard of quality, we wouldn't have bottom feeders like Marvell, VIA, Broadcom and friends. Like all other things made in China, it's a race to the bottom. Why should we expect otherwise, when their time is so cheap compared to ours ? If I lose a month's work due to corruption, I'm out a good $5k. If they lose a month's work... well they lost less than the cost of the board.
When companies throw around billions of dollars on mere whims, that to me is proof that our financial model is obsolete. These corporations wield far too much power and influence and should be broken up.
Does the fact that Oracle is a 40 billion dollar company result in better products ? No. Ask any Oracle admin.
All it does it give them the power to bully everyone else around until there is nothing left. They gobbled up Sun. They chugged MySQL. They bought John Ashcroft (not that this was any challenge). To outsiders, Oracle is an example of everything that's wrong with America. They take and take, and they never give back.
Here is, IMO, the most telling line in the article:
just because Apple has a runaway success on its hands, they cannot charge Apple prices for their hastily developed me-too products
And that is exactly how I feel. Don't get me wrong, I've been a PC guy since kindergarten, and while I do own a few Apple products, it is largely because I get paid to develop apps. I still hate OSX and IOS for being so restrictive and toy-like, but the one thing I can't take away from Apple is that when they put out an idea, they run with it. Everyone else sees dollar signs and rushes to copy what they see, which is like those bums on the street selling fake Rolexes. They all fail to appreciate what truly makes the iPad unique: it's idiot-proof! The other two tablets suffer from their PC ancestry: too many stupid goddamned apps and knobs and tweaks that should not be necessary on such a limited-usage device. Fire up a brand new iPad and you have about a dozen apps on the home screen. Fire up a brand new Android and that app menu is over 50 icons long. It's overwhelming, and most people will never use about 48 of those 50 apps :P
The impression I get is that the Android and Blackberry folks don't give two shits about interface design and usability. If these things have been put through user testing, they need to replace those useless users because there is no way in hell my mother would feel comfortable with one of their devices. Heck, it took me a few minutes just to figure out how to get Angry Birds on the wife's Android. But the iPad ? I just handed it to her, told her that "Safari is the internet" and off she went. Now she has every goddamned Popcap game under the sun installed, with no further interaction from me. That says a lot about how little thought went into the knockoff products.
Did the attack take place over the internet ? Or was an android used to execute the attacks ? No ? Then it is NOT cybercrime. It's not cyber-anything!
This was a meatspace attack, the kind any 12 year old can perform with a card cloner - you know, a small, simple electronic device consisting of about $15 worth of components and a few hundred bytes of PIC code. I figure all they did was run the same cards simultaneously at different ATMs, exploiting a probably very huge gaping race condition in the bank's software. More importantly, I wouldn't be surprised if many other banks were also vulnerable to this type of attack, with no intentions to fix it. The only reason we don't hear about it more often is because most of us in the western world don't have dozens of sketchy friends with the nerves to coordinate this sort of attack yet still remain trustworthy. We also tend to have more to lose from getting caught, than the few thousand dollars gained in a successful attack. Is it worth risking a criminal record and incarceration for the sake of a year's salary ? For most of us the answer is no. We aren't criminals, not because we're "good people", but because it is simply not worth the risk. If the take were larger by an order of magnitude, you'll find allegedly honest people are suddenly far more interested in taking that risk.