You're trying to say that ATMs aren't really all that vulnerable, because they're running some Uber-53R37 proprietary ATM protocol.
Of course, this protocol is SO SECRET, it even has a name (which is WOSA, XFS, FXS, CERN-MS, or something).
Here's the problem. It occurs to me that any time you've got some mechanism for data transport that involves humans (in design, implementation, or use), you've also got a mechanism that will transport arbitrary malicious data, as long as it's massaged just-so.
Now tell me: What prevents a worm from traversing this double-plus magic protocol, just like they've traversed almost every other "secure" protocol? The Easter Bunny?
There's ten bazillion wires in cars. The reason for this is that there's ten bazillion different things that need done, all in different places.
Fiber optics won't help that problem at all.
The only way to reduce cabling and maintain functionality is to use a multipoint data bus of some sort. And it doesn't make a lick of difference if that bus runs over twisted pair, single-mode AT&T glass fiber, coax, or bailing wire. In terms of quantity, they're all the same.
And now that we know we need a bus, we need a topology. I don't think 1394 supports ring, and I doubt that Nissan is doing any wacky IP routing tricks in their car, so there will be zero redundancy.
Which brings us to a choice: You'll either have multiple single points of failure that will disable multiple systems simutaneously, or you'll have just as many wires as you started out with. No getting around that, at least not with IEEE 1394. Think about that until it makes sense.
As for troubleshooting, it would be a complete pain in the ass. I can verify every cable, and read almost every sensor in my car with a volt-ohm meter. I can't read shit on Nissan's proprietary 1394 network. The extent of one's diagnostic capability would be limited to shouting "OH MY GOD, I'M BLIND!" after verifying that light is, indeed, travelling down the pipe.
But there's really nothing to suggest that any of these things are happening.
Rather than anything particularly grand, it seems that all Nissan has done is accomplish the divine feat of transmitting video images over Firewire. My grandmother has been doing this at home with her DV camcorder for years. Color me unimpressed.
Besides:
Automotive wiring isn't too bad, really, for simple maintenance and modifications. The biggest problem, usually, is that some of the wires are hard to get to.
Yeah, sure, there's a fuckton of wiring in a modern car. But they're all documented, each and every one of 'em. And they all make sense.
Your headlights failed when you installed your new radio because you did not RTFM sufficiently.
It's not hard stuff. Radios use four positives, (hopefully) four negatives, power, switched power, ground, antenna, sometimes a wire for an antenna motor and sometimes one for lighting. Either go to the library, and learn about which wires do what before you begin, or buy your documentation in the form of a pre-labelled wiring harness. (This should be obvious.)
Right. It's all standard stuff, except for the motherboard, the case, and the power supply.
Which, of course, is all that the bloody things consist of anyway.
So I think what you're really trying to tell me is this: Shuttle's small PCs are absolutely proprietary, containing zero off-the-shelf parts.
Heatpipes can be elegant, and often are, but that doesn't invalidate my commentary. Heatpipes are a comparative pain in the ass in any present implementation. And in Shuttle's case, they're a solution to a problem which is created by the percieved, fictitious need to have a small, proprietary PC. In other words, it's needless bullshit.
Save the money. Buy a standardized box, with a standardized motherboard. It's only a few inches taller, after all. Spend the cash that you didn't drop on a proprietary low-volume motherboard, power supply, and heatsink on extra RAM or a RAID array or beer or something.
Or just buy a laptop, and enjoy real portability with zero cabling and a built-in UPS.
Great. It's a USB WiFi adapter, cleverly packaged in the form of 5(!) seperate parts, that happens to be able to mount on the back of a Shuttle box. I've seen high-school students build better-integrated componentry than that.
The only advantage I see of this, versus a Cardbus of PCI adapter, is that it costs more. In other words, it is a ripoff.
And it is such a ripoff that one doesn't even get any bragging rights with it. (unless you're the sort who likes to say "Hey everyone! Look at what a sucker I am!")
It occurs to me that a Shuttle box is just as carefully budgeted and proprietary as any laptop. The tradeoffs made in the name of smallness are far in excess of their expansiveness. They are, in essence, a big, cumbersome laptop with an AGP port, no battery, no display, no keyboard, no pointer, no speakers, and a snakepit of attached cables.
That said, what upgrades can one perform on a Shuttle that one cannot perform on a laptop?
Let us examine this question. Laptops offer the following easy upgrades:
RAM Hard drive CPU (this involves heatpipes and prayer) CD-ROM
Additionally, it is sometimes possible to upgrade the following in modern laptops, provided that you Did Your Fucking Homework before buying:
Internal WiFi Video
Shuttle boxen offer the following upgrades:
RAM Hard drive CPU (this -also- involves heatpipes and prayer) CD-ROM Video (What WiFi?)
Of course, one cannot easily switch CPU architectures on a laptop. But then, one cannot easily do that on a Shuttle machine, either.
Therefore, Shuttle machines (given their relatively high cost and relative lack of expansion and portability) are useful only for applications where a tiny, stationary desktop machine or headless A/V component is desired. Laptops and more-conventional desktops (Micro-ATX, perhaps ATX or BTX) win in all other categories.
If you want a portable machine, buy one that's portable - a laptop.
If you want a desktop machine, buy a desktop machine.
If you want a portable desktop machine, just rivet a handle to the top of it so you can carry it with one hand.
I don't buy for a second that there's no room in the trunk of the car for a mid-tower case. Nor do I accept that any sane individual would use public transit or bicycle to transport a Shuttle box and LCD display on any regular basis. I also assert that any individual reading this who feels they might be unduly strained by lifting a micro-ATX case instead of a flyspeck Shuttle PC would probably benefit greatly from either the extra exercise of the heavier box, or the serious reduction in bulk and cabling afforded by carrying a laptop instead.
Shuttle's miniature computers, like the tablet PCs of the mid-90s, are a niche solution waiting for a problem that isn't likely to surface anytime soon. This is why they're not very common. And it is also (once you apply the inverse of supply and demand that generally affects computer pricing) why they're so bloody expensive.
In short, Shuttle PCs are stupid and overpriced. I am amazed that they're even in production at this point. Save the money to invest in a cheap, light-guage steel ATX box, good power supply, high-quality motherboard, better video card, and a $5 strap handle from the local pro audio supplier.
(I'm willing to debate this ad infinitum, and I'm quite certain that I'm correct. So, don't bother replying. Thanks.)
Registering a domain (or anything else, really) to an ISP email account is a bad idea.
So your forgetful cousin switches from SBC DSL to Roadrunner. He'll still miss his renewal reminders.
Case in point: There's a salesman where I work who used to use his personal DSL account to conduct business. That DSL pipe never really worked very well, but for the longest time it was all he could get. Sometime later, he switched to cable. But he's still paying Way Too Much for a DSL account that isn't connected to anything but an open loop, just to keep his old address alive. That old email is printed on thousands of business cards and in Godknowshowmany telephone books. It'll cost him $90, every month, until the end of time.
Better to just create for yourself an account with a free POP3 provider, so that you don't have so many services and accounts tied to an ISP whose sole purpose in life -should be- to just provide some bandwidth (and, perhaps, Usenet).
But it's even better to register yourself a free domain (afraid.org is your friend) and use that for all that Important Stuff that relates to one's Other Domain.
And it's arguably even better than that to use -both- of these techniques, while instructing your free POP3 host to forward mail to an address at your free domain.
That way, if it all comes to horrible screeching halt (not even Linux is immune to Sudden Catastrophic Failure Syndrome), you've still got a happy free webmail interface to which your Important Stuff is already going.
This also has the added advantage of being another hop for email to traverse. Normally, this might be considered a bad thing, but it eliminates the need for a secondary MX server (which can be difficult to source for free) for all imaginable home uses. And so, if your email box becomes un-fubar'd within a reasonable amount of time, you never miss a message.
(If you're having trouble finding a free email host that enables this functionaliry, just look up about 8 paragraphs.)
Lots of steps? Sure. But nobody ever said it was -easy- to have reliable email without paying anyone an extra cent.
It wasn't very hard for me to set up such a sytem, here. I've maintained a *nix box at home for printing, storage, and routing for almost a decade. It was rather easy to set up Postfix and amavis on that machine, configure dhcpcd to update my IP address at afraid.org, and get my mail forwarded over to it. Roadrunner does a pretty good job of keeping the machine connected for the $50/month that I was going to be paying anyway, and during those times when they don't, my free email provider keeps a backlog for me. It's not tainted with any of that fetchmailesque nonsense, and if I ever hop ISPs, things keep working automatically.
So, since I already had the box and the bandwidth, the whole bag cost me precisely dick but a few hours of my time. I get to keep my own backups without worrying about bandwidth or quotas. And it's at least as reliable as Hotmail. (grin, snicker, etc)
boot the rescue kernel, edit the fstab, fsck, and off you go....
Extra steps for extra parts, assuming it even works. With software RAID, you can literally just slam the drive into a different system, push the "power" button, and (assuming you've made sufficiently generic kernels and modules, which you should be doing anyway) the system will come to life. If fsck is needed, it'll do that for you too, just like a proper operating system tends to do.
"It's really not that much more of a pain in the ass, it sometimes doesn't end up fucking you into a corner, and it's not very expensive" are not a very good reasons to go about adding additional points of failure to a system that isn't supposed to fail.
Is there anything that's actually better about hardware RAID adapters?
New feature-to-die-for in FreeBSD 5: Snapshots. If you don't want to use them, that's only because you don't sufficiently understand them. They're good for everything from making consistant offline backups, to acting like a time machine for the more hapless of users. Unfortunately, in order to use this feature, one must also use the rest of 5.x, which is no fun.
With Gentoo, I don't get bind, sendmail, a logger, a bootloader, or anything else, unless I ask for it. The system is thus precisely as bloated as I want to make it, and not a bit more.
The BSDs' portupgrade utility does do a decent job, but it's just another tool that puts ports on par with what portage has done from the start.
And I'd so much rather use portage, than the strange confluence of binary packages, included base software, and ports that comprise a modern BSD system.
"emerge sync&&emerge clamav&&/etc/init.d/clamd restart" has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?
I rely on software RAID. It's not for monetary reasons, either - I know that real RAID controllers aren't expensive anymore. Software RAID just offers one fewer part to fail (does anyone here remember KISS?), and will not tie me down to using any specific type of hardware.
I've not heard of any problems with software RAID that could not be attributed to user error. And, having made some of those errors myself, I think I'm now qualified to operate it. I've heard numerous horror stories about RAID cards gone mad, though, and those are supposed to be foolproof (complete with "ARE YOU SURE?" prompts).
I can remove one of the software-RAID1 SATA drives (hot, cold, whatever), plug it into any other SATA system, and it'll boot and run. I cannot do this with hardware RAID unless I have the same make and model controller on-hand.
How fast can you get a specific, 5-year-old 3ware card? (Remember, this is a box that was built to last.)
On operating systems:
I hate Debian. But this isn't the right application for it, anyway. It's a mail server. It's primary roles, after surviving and delivering messages, are spam filtering and virus scanning. Spam and viruses move fast. I'm not at all hip to waiting two years for Debian to get around to blessing a three-year-old version of amavis or clamav. So I'd be either compiling those myself, or using "unstable" debs with unstable dependancies. And then, it's not -stable anymore.
I've been fucked by FreeBSD-current too many times (and the ports collection is in not, in any way, superior to portage), though filesystem snapshots are cool. -stable works better, but it takes Way Too Long for features to creep over to it. And the monolithic "make installworld" routine is frightening, at best. I don't have the resources to have identical testing machines to see what got trashed in CVS today. OTOH, Gentoo gives me a way to step back on upgrades if things take a turn for the worse, as well as the option to only upgrade things that need upgrading instead than everything, all at once. FreeBSD releases are a joke.
And I thought that NetBSD died in the womb. I might be wrong, but I think I read that here, somewhere... I did attempt to run it on a 486, a Really Long Time Ago. Its performance, at that time and on that system, could only be described as "glacial," even playing nethack. Slackware was much zippier, and even ran Netscape under X with acceptable speed for the day. Call me jaded.
I use Gentoo. I read Bugtraq, and pay attention to GLSAs. I only upgrade things that need upgrading, and I keep every single old package around, just in case. I've got an excellent perspective on what got changed, when, and why, on my server. I do not anticipate any software failures, but I'm ready for them.
1. Nonsense? From me? Perhaps. But JWZ rants much more prolifically about it than I ever could, here. I don't want my server's data married to the motherboard. And I'm not going to pain myself trying.
'Sides, CPUs caught up with hard drives a -long- time ago. The performance hit of software RAID-1 cost me perhaps $10 in CPU power. Whooptie shit.
2. Clearly. Now, tell me, how would this be any different if I had purchased an Proliant ML330 for more money and less function? Remember, I said nothing about any "datacenter enviroment." I just wrote a bit about how I put together a solitary mail server.
I don't know how the rest of the world does it, and I don't really care.
The mail server where I work used to consist of a 733MHz Celeron, branded E-Machines. It was a disused desktop machine from Joe Random (Joe, of course, has a shiny new Dell on his desk to replace it). Complete with a $3 PCI RTL8139 NIC, it was the epitome of cheap.
If any part failed, including the 175-Watt PSU, the machine would die completely.
It'd been that way since I started with the company.
I mentioned it to a higher-up, who happens to be a rather important salesman of moderate technical inclination, and whose sales depend primarily on reliable email.
He insisted that I do something about it, and so I began doing so.
I fought with the RAID adapter in a Proliant that we had spare before I realized why people generally loathe binary drivers under Linux. I looked for another way to connect the hard drives, but the box only had one(!) real IDE channel, and it was consumed by a pair of CD-ROM drives.
I sat and fathomed that for awhile: Big server box, stout steel constuction, Serverworks chipset, ECC RAM, huge cooling, 64-bit PCI, one P4 Xeon and room for a second. Unsupportable hardware RAID. One bloody IDE channel. No SCSI. The sound of nonsensical madness was deafening.
So I just built one. I had a few priorities, like redundant PSU cooling, Pentium 4 (I'm an AMD fanboy, but thermal throttling is your friend, even if the chip is vastly overpriced), redundant storage, good IO performance, and the ability to replace any (or every) part with something that can be sourced locally within an hour or so. Oh, and it has to be cheap.
I also made a list of non-priorities: Don't need a lot of number-crunching ability, don't need redundant PSUs, don't care about multiple CPUs.
"Who makes server mainboards," I asked myself. I answered myself with "Tyan."
I've never read anything but good stuff about Tyan. So I got one of their P4 boards. Not a "server" board, but one of their lesser (single-CPU) models which were hopefully developed by the same engineers. Two channels of SATA RAID, four DIMM slots, very few other built-in goodies, except for two additional PATA ports.
It supports dual-channel ECC RAM, so I picked up a couple of quarter-gig sticks of that. Could've gotten more, but remember, this is a -budget- server. (It seldom swaps, and when it does, the disks are fast enough to make it a non-issue.)
Also picked up a couple of Western Digital 80GB SATA drives, because Moving Parts Are Important, MMkay?, and at the time they were the only ones still offering a 5-year warranty. This machine is supposed to live longer than that before it is outgrown.
And for good measure, I included a Pioneer DVD-R for offline backups. I hate tapes.
I tossed it all in the cheapest black case I could find (newegg, $24, shipped). I threw away the included PSU and replaced it with a big Antec Truepower.
Killed the hardware RAID in favor of Linux's software RAID1. I have no intentions of ever marrying a computer's software to something as general and failure-prone as a modern motherboard - out-of-the-box RAID is a great way to fuck yourself at disaster-recovery time.
It runs Gentoo, and and filters and tosses mail something like twenty times the rate of the old E-Machines consumerbox (which had buried itself in backlogged mail a few times).
We've got redundancy of cooling and storage, we've got a graceful fail-safe on the CPU fan, and we've got a disaster plan that includes being able to find parts from the mom-and-pop shop down the street, or mounting the SATA drives in that wretched Proliant with a PCI controller, or (at worst) setting up the Proliant's DVD-ROM and one of its 80gig drives as master/slave and restoring from DVD-R.
I'm pleased with it. It was cheap. It went together slicker than greased shit. I don't think it's going to fail anytime soon, but if it does, at least I don't have to worry abou
Good stuff. But remember that WiMax right now consists of little more than marketingspeak, and they're not even trying to sell it to end-users yet. They're trying to sell it to themselves. NLOS? At tens-of-GHz? Erm...
So long as we're spouting off about a lot of hot air, I've got an idea.
I've been wanting a large-scale, spontaneous, wireless mesh network for a long, long time. A self-organizing clusterfuck of relatively inexpensive, mostly random gear, continously learning how to route packets from here to wherever most efficiently. Also, too: Removing The Man from the mix.
Altruistic? Not quite. The altruistic view, ala SeattleWireless and friends, dreams of a free mesh network, etc, lends itself to serious abuse, and is an example of communism. Communism works better with intangible software than for finite resources like bandwidth.
This other way involves quite a bit of money changing hands in a free market, little implicit trust (avoiding abuses of the sort that have been happening with SMTP for the past decade, and maybe even fixing spam), hordes of people being handed pinkslips because they've been made redundant by functional routing, and a real economy that would allow places like slashdot to survive by virtue of its existance instead of relying on an advertising market that will remain completely fucked for the foreseeable future.
We can proof-of-concept the RF end of this with existing technologies (ad-hoc 802.11), except for the magical uber-fast routing (which needs to be done in hardware that costs nothing extra and contains no moving parts, or the Joe Averages won't care enough to implement it).
I don't see how WiMax is going to do anything to help with that routing.
And there's still political, logistic, monetary, and business problems with the whole thing. I'll now go on at supreme length to describe the only feasible way I can imagine any of this shit actually working.
Local links in dense areas are easy and obvious. But what if you want to go further than across downtown Dallas?
Using Joe Average's Speakeasy DSL bandwidth to get out of the city is only a partial answer. Joe won't want to pay his DSL forever, if he can use some other Joe's DSL for free. The system then collapses. That's a problem. The solution is to provide Joe with some compensation.
The RF layer should be very frequency-agile and automatically so, such that if you can't get to where you're going at 11GHz it will automatically reduce frequency into real NLOS ranges (UHF TV spectrum, coming soon to a WLAN near you). WiMax, AFAIK, won't help with this. I don't know of anything, currently, that will. But without it, things will never be reliable in a chaotic mesh network.
The view from 300 feet up in the air atop a tower here in NW Ohio includes forrest (which completely covers most houses, even in the city), fields, radio towers, occasional tall buildings, and the tall streetlamps that ODOT likes to plant at rest areas, interchanges, and all along major highways in population centers. Every now and then, the highways themselves can be seen poking through the treeline (thanks to roadside deforrestation).
So that's what we've got to work with, at least here, for long-distance links.
The forrest obstructs. And nobody's going to have another Dust Bowl just for the sake of bandwidth.
The buildings also obstruct, but with the correct amount of bribery (or explaining The Greater Good) to the right people, can be turned into repeaters.
Government might be able to be talked into turning some lamp posts into access points, which will help along the routes betweeen population centers.
The cars on the highway are fine repeaters. Anecdotally, having done a lot of driving and seen a few MRTG plots, I'd say that traffic on I-75 happens in roughly the same patterns as local Internet traffic, which works out well.
And of course people will want bandwidth in cars and trucks. Not only does it keep t
So, what's so cool about it?
on
WiMax: When, Not If
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Not to brag, as I have no idea how fast WiMax professes to be, but:
I've already got a functional network, where endpoints are all about 10 miles away from a central access point. It runs 5.7GHz Motorola Canopy, and shoots several megabits per second in any direction over flat terrain.
No funky amps, no wacky antennas, no broken FCC regs, and no lossy coaxial feedlines. Just a clear line of sight and some out-of-the-box Canopy gear. It works well enough that I don't particularly care that it is proprietary.
What advantage does WiMax offer? (And remember, over here in the real world, tens-of-GHz frequencies are usually not advantageous.)
I did this years ago, on a K6-2, using cron, LAME, and a bit of scripting to handle the encoding (which was nowhere near realtime on that CPU). Mid-side encoded, tweaked a bit - it sounded good.
I just plugged an old, standalone Kenwood tuner (which was free) into a (quite nice) $10 Yamaha XG sound card. And then it was done, finished, and completed.
If I wanted to play it in realtime, I just loaded the temporary WAV file in XMMS.
I see no reason why this wouldn't work on OS X.
An addendum to this hack (if one could even call it that) would be to use a different tuner that can be computer-controller (or Mindstorms to push the preset buttons). But, since there's only one FM station here with content that was worth recording, I never bothered.
Would someone please tell me what it is about this product that makes it front-page material?
(Oh. And those of you who think you're going to be able to record AM broadcasts anywhere near an actively-running PC, think again.)
Else, I've got a P133 which has been running continuously for five years or so with only a large heatsink on the CPU (no fan), and a power supply fan that hardly turns.
It's a real trooper. I'd be happy to sell it to you.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Of those 1.6m jobs, how many of them don't suck?
A recent trip to the grocery store taught me a few things:
The McDonald's on the way to the store has a sign that says "Now hiring - $8.50/hr". This is the same rate that they had posted in 1998. Wages for sucky jobs have thus not improved.
Coke and Pepsi are dramatically more expensive than they were six years ago. This is either due to inflation, or a relative decrease in salaries for soda-consuming people who are now spending relatively more of their money on important things like food and rent instead of sugar water.
Steady and strong? The lowest common denominators show otherwise, and the US is deporting labor to other countries as fast as possible. Who else should I be blaming, if not Junior? It sure as fuck isn't my fault - I'm doing the best I can on my end.
But none of this matters. The simple fact is that Americans are being forced to work harder and harder, but their quality of life is decreasing. I can name endless examples, but I shouldn't have to.
What's bizarre is that you've had XP lock up and crash on you.
Say what you will, but I use it rather frequently on a number of different machines, and I'm faced with supporting a couple of dozen XP machines at work. Applications may die from time to time, but I've never experienced a lockup under XP as long as the hardware is good and the spyware is absent.
If it is crashy for you under VMWare on a box where Linux is stable, I can only suspect that one or more of the following things is probably true:
- Operator error - VMWare is buggy - Bunk drivers - Operator error - VMWare is buggy
I'm sure that your commentary is a tremendous comfort for those among us who have dedicated most of their lives to working with computers, only to be laid off and become cab drivers.
Oh, and yeah - I blame Junior. Who in their right mind wouldn't?
Would you believe that I just reloaded Slashdot in Firefox, right as this article is posted, only to have the thing turn glacial and unusable?
You'd think we'd be farther along than this after a decade.
Let's hope that the new Firefox RC series Doesn't Suck. (That earlier versions tended to suck less in general than other browsers does not a non-sucky browser make.)
That seems like a lot of work. No, scratch that - is is a lot of work.
And if I want to change the default fonts (say, because I'm sick of I1|, '`, and {([ looking far too similar), what then? Do I get to hunt around in a dozen different places and change them all over again? Can I ever expect my users/customers to be able to do this by themselves?
At this point, why would I ever recommend any flavor of Linux in an enviroment where fonts were a concern? Why wouldn't I just sell them one of the two popular commercial operating systems that include good, easy-to-use font support out of the box (OS X, XP)?
Is the a reason why these settings don't exist solely in the form of X screen resources?
Your argument falls on its face in light of the fact that the number of electoral votes given to a State is determined by that State's population.
Therefore, South and North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, and probably a few other states, are vastly under-represented precisely because they they're a minority.
Since your post contains nothing substantial but provable bullshit, and it got modded to +5 for some strange reason, here's your Basic Rebuttal:
1. Of course.
2. Of course not. Nobody will trust their machine to somehow automatically detect and skip commercials, particularly while in the process of burning to relatively expensive write-once media.
3. Maybe, but probably not. TFA does not mention what format the machine writes DVDs in. But it does say that the stuff on the hard drive is MPEG2, and we know the usual file size of that MPEG2 data[1] and how fast it'll burn.
4. If all you're storing is Big Files, and optimize sector allocation accordingly (not difficult - see TiVo's MFS, reading and writing 3 MPEG2 streams concurrently on a dog-slow Quantum LCT with an even slower Motorola 68k CPU and even less RAM), you'll not have much fragmentation. Ever.
5. Of course.
6. Duh.
7[1]. Easy. The box holds 709 hours in "EP" mode. It contains a a 400 gig drive. This gives us a filesize of about 560MB for one hour of EP video. If we're shooting EP video onto a garden-variety 8x DVD-R at just over 10 megabytes per second, 56 seconds is perfectly reasonable. My cheap-shit NEC 2510 will almost do this, using absolutely unoptimized burning software on a busy, garden-variety PC.
But, Panasonic has the unquestionably beneficial role of being in charge of producing the purpose-built hardware -and- the single-role software. Their product should be able to handle this task, in that time, without much difficulty at all.
And even if the marketing drivel -is- all lies, it's within a couple of seconds of the truth.
Slashdot Mirror
So. Let me get this straight:
You're trying to say that ATMs aren't really all that vulnerable, because they're running some Uber-53R37 proprietary ATM protocol.
Of course, this protocol is SO SECRET, it even has a name (which is WOSA, XFS, FXS, CERN-MS, or something).
Here's the problem. It occurs to me that any time you've got some mechanism for data transport that involves humans (in design, implementation, or use), you've also got a mechanism that will transport arbitrary malicious data, as long as it's massaged just-so.
Now tell me: What prevents a worm from traversing this double-plus magic protocol, just like they've traversed almost every other "secure" protocol? The Easter Bunny?
There's ten bazillion wires in cars. The reason for this is that there's ten bazillion different things that need done, all in different places.
Fiber optics won't help that problem at all.
The only way to reduce cabling and maintain functionality is to use a multipoint data bus of some sort. And it doesn't make a lick of difference if that bus runs over twisted pair, single-mode AT&T glass fiber, coax, or bailing wire. In terms of quantity, they're all the same.
And now that we know we need a bus, we need a topology. I don't think 1394 supports ring, and I doubt that Nissan is doing any wacky IP routing tricks in their car, so there will be zero redundancy.
Which brings us to a choice: You'll either have multiple single points of failure that will disable multiple systems simutaneously, or you'll have just as many wires as you started out with. No getting around that, at least not with IEEE 1394. Think about that until it makes sense.
As for troubleshooting, it would be a complete pain in the ass. I can verify every cable, and read almost every sensor in my car with a volt-ohm meter. I can't read shit on Nissan's proprietary 1394 network. The extent of one's diagnostic capability would be limited to shouting "OH MY GOD, I'M BLIND!" after verifying that light is, indeed, travelling down the pipe.
But there's really nothing to suggest that any of these things are happening.
Rather than anything particularly grand, it seems that all Nissan has done is accomplish the divine feat of transmitting video images over Firewire. My grandmother has been doing this at home with her DV camcorder for years. Color me unimpressed.
Besides:
Automotive wiring isn't too bad, really, for simple maintenance and modifications. The biggest problem, usually, is that some of the wires are hard to get to.
Yeah, sure, there's a fuckton of wiring in a modern car. But they're all documented, each and every one of 'em. And they all make sense.
Your headlights failed when you installed your new radio because you did not RTFM sufficiently.
It's not hard stuff. Radios use four positives, (hopefully) four negatives, power, switched power, ground, antenna, sometimes a wire for an antenna motor and sometimes one for lighting. Either go to the library, and learn about which wires do what before you begin, or buy your documentation in the form of a pre-labelled wiring harness. (This should be obvious.)
Right. It's all standard stuff, except for the motherboard, the case, and the power supply.
Which, of course, is all that the bloody things consist of anyway.
So I think what you're really trying to tell me is this: Shuttle's small PCs are absolutely proprietary, containing zero off-the-shelf parts.
Heatpipes can be elegant, and often are, but that doesn't invalidate my commentary. Heatpipes are a comparative pain in the ass in any present implementation. And in Shuttle's case, they're a solution to a problem which is created by the percieved, fictitious need to have a small, proprietary PC. In other words, it's needless bullshit.
Save the money. Buy a standardized box, with a standardized motherboard. It's only a few inches taller, after all. Spend the cash that you didn't drop on a proprietary low-volume motherboard, power supply, and heatsink on extra RAM or a RAID array or beer or something.
Or just buy a laptop, and enjoy real portability with zero cabling and a built-in UPS.
Great. It's a USB WiFi adapter, cleverly packaged in the form of 5(!) seperate parts, that happens to be able to mount on the back of a Shuttle box. I've seen high-school students build better-integrated componentry than that.
The only advantage I see of this, versus a Cardbus of PCI adapter, is that it costs more. In other words, it is a ripoff.
And it is such a ripoff that one doesn't even get any bragging rights with it. (unless you're the sort who likes to say "Hey everyone! Look at what a sucker I am!")
What's the point?
*yawn*
It occurs to me that a Shuttle box is just as carefully budgeted and proprietary as any laptop. The tradeoffs made in the name of smallness are far in excess of their expansiveness. They are, in essence, a big, cumbersome laptop with an AGP port, no battery, no display, no keyboard, no pointer, no speakers, and a snakepit of attached cables.
That said, what upgrades can one perform on a Shuttle that one cannot perform on a laptop?
Let us examine this question. Laptops offer the following easy upgrades:
RAM
Hard drive
CPU (this involves heatpipes and prayer)
CD-ROM
Additionally, it is sometimes possible to upgrade the following in modern laptops, provided that you Did Your Fucking Homework before buying:
Internal WiFi
Video
Shuttle boxen offer the following upgrades:
RAM
Hard drive
CPU (this -also- involves heatpipes and prayer)
CD-ROM
Video
(What WiFi?)
Of course, one cannot easily switch CPU architectures on a laptop. But then, one cannot easily do that on a Shuttle machine, either.
Therefore, Shuttle machines (given their relatively high cost and relative lack of expansion and portability) are useful only for applications where a tiny, stationary desktop machine or headless A/V component is desired. Laptops and more-conventional desktops (Micro-ATX, perhaps ATX or BTX) win in all other categories.
If you want a portable machine, buy one that's portable - a laptop.
If you want a desktop machine, buy a desktop machine.
If you want a portable desktop machine, just rivet a handle to the top of it so you can carry it with one hand.
I don't buy for a second that there's no room in the trunk of the car for a mid-tower case. Nor do I accept that any sane individual would use public transit or bicycle to transport a Shuttle box and LCD display on any regular basis. I also assert that any individual reading this who feels they might be unduly strained by lifting a micro-ATX case instead of a flyspeck Shuttle PC would probably benefit greatly from either the extra exercise of the heavier box, or the serious reduction in bulk and cabling afforded by carrying a laptop instead.
Shuttle's miniature computers, like the tablet PCs of the mid-90s, are a niche solution waiting for a problem that isn't likely to surface anytime soon. This is why they're not very common. And it is also (once you apply the inverse of supply and demand that generally affects computer pricing) why they're so bloody expensive.
In short, Shuttle PCs are stupid and overpriced. I am amazed that they're even in production at this point. Save the money to invest in a cheap, light-guage steel ATX box, good power supply, high-quality motherboard, better video card, and a $5 strap handle from the local pro audio supplier.
(I'm willing to debate this ad infinitum, and I'm quite certain that I'm correct. So, don't bother replying. Thanks.)
Registering a domain (or anything else, really) to an ISP email account is a bad idea.
So your forgetful cousin switches from SBC DSL to Roadrunner. He'll still miss his renewal reminders.
Case in point: There's a salesman where I work who used to use his personal DSL account to conduct business. That DSL pipe never really worked very well, but for the longest time it was all he could get. Sometime later, he switched to cable. But he's still paying Way Too Much for a DSL account that isn't connected to anything but an open loop, just to keep his old address alive. That old email is printed on thousands of business cards and in Godknowshowmany telephone books. It'll cost him $90, every month, until the end of time.
Better to just create for yourself an account with a free POP3 provider, so that you don't have so many services and accounts tied to an ISP whose sole purpose in life -should be- to just provide some bandwidth (and, perhaps, Usenet).
But it's even better to register yourself a free domain (afraid.org is your friend) and use that for all that Important Stuff that relates to one's Other Domain.
And it's arguably even better than that to use -both- of these techniques, while instructing your free POP3 host to forward mail to an address at your free domain.
That way, if it all comes to horrible screeching halt (not even Linux is immune to Sudden Catastrophic Failure Syndrome), you've still got a happy free webmail interface to which your Important Stuff is already going.
This also has the added advantage of being another hop for email to traverse. Normally, this might be considered a bad thing, but it eliminates the need for a secondary MX server (which can be difficult to source for free) for all imaginable home uses. And so, if your email box becomes un-fubar'd within a reasonable amount of time, you never miss a message.
(If you're having trouble finding a free email host that enables this functionaliry, just look up about 8 paragraphs.)
Lots of steps? Sure. But nobody ever said it was -easy- to have reliable email without paying anyone an extra cent.
It wasn't very hard for me to set up such a sytem, here. I've maintained a *nix box at home for printing, storage, and routing for almost a decade. It was rather easy to set up Postfix and amavis on that machine, configure dhcpcd to update my IP address at afraid.org, and get my mail forwarded over to it. Roadrunner does a pretty good job of keeping the machine connected for the $50/month that I was going to be paying anyway, and during those times when they don't, my free email provider keeps a backlog for me. It's not tainted with any of that fetchmailesque nonsense, and if I ever hop ISPs, things keep working automatically.
So, since I already had the box and the bandwidth, the whole bag cost me precisely dick but a few hours of my time. I get to keep my own backups without worrying about bandwidth or quotas. And it's at least as reliable as Hotmail. (grin, snicker, etc)
boot the rescue kernel, edit the fstab, fsck, and off you go....
Extra steps for extra parts, assuming it even works. With software RAID, you can literally just slam the drive into a different system, push the "power" button, and (assuming you've made sufficiently generic kernels and modules, which you should be doing anyway) the system will come to life. If fsck is needed, it'll do that for you too, just like a proper operating system tends to do.
"It's really not that much more of a pain in the ass, it sometimes doesn't end up fucking you into a corner, and it's not very expensive" are not a very good reasons to go about adding additional points of failure to a system that isn't supposed to fail.
Is there anything that's actually better about hardware RAID adapters?
New feature-to-die-for in FreeBSD 5: Snapshots. If you don't want to use them, that's only because you don't sufficiently understand them. They're good for everything from making consistant offline backups, to acting like a time machine for the more hapless of users. Unfortunately, in order to use this feature, one must also use the rest of 5.x, which is no fun.
With Gentoo, I don't get bind, sendmail, a logger, a bootloader, or anything else, unless I ask for it. The system is thus precisely as bloated as I want to make it, and not a bit more.
The BSDs' portupgrade utility does do a decent job, but it's just another tool that puts ports on par with what portage has done from the start.
And I'd so much rather use portage, than the strange confluence of binary packages, included base software, and ports that comprise a modern BSD system.
"emerge sync&&emerge clamav&&/etc/init.d/clamd restart" has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?
I rely on software RAID. It's not for monetary reasons, either - I know that real RAID controllers aren't expensive anymore. Software RAID just offers one fewer part to fail (does anyone here remember KISS?), and will not tie me down to using any specific type of hardware.
I've not heard of any problems with software RAID that could not be attributed to user error. And, having made some of those errors myself, I think I'm now qualified to operate it. I've heard numerous horror stories about RAID cards gone mad, though, and those are supposed to be foolproof (complete with "ARE YOU SURE?" prompts).
I can remove one of the software-RAID1 SATA drives (hot, cold, whatever), plug it into any other SATA system, and it'll boot and run. I cannot do this with hardware RAID unless I have the same make and model controller on-hand.
How fast can you get a specific, 5-year-old 3ware card? (Remember, this is a box that was built to last.)
On operating systems:
I hate Debian. But this isn't the right application for it, anyway. It's a mail server. It's primary roles, after surviving and delivering messages, are spam filtering and virus scanning. Spam and viruses move fast. I'm not at all hip to waiting two years for Debian to get around to blessing a three-year-old version of amavis or clamav. So I'd be either compiling those myself, or using "unstable" debs with unstable dependancies. And then, it's not -stable anymore.
I've been fucked by FreeBSD-current too many times (and the ports collection is in not, in any way, superior to portage), though filesystem snapshots are cool. -stable works better, but it takes Way Too Long for features to creep over to it. And the monolithic "make installworld" routine is frightening, at best. I don't have the resources to have identical testing machines to see what got trashed in CVS today. OTOH, Gentoo gives me a way to step back on upgrades if things take a turn for the worse, as well as the option to only upgrade things that need upgrading instead than everything, all at once. FreeBSD releases are a joke.
And I thought that NetBSD died in the womb. I might be wrong, but I think I read that here, somewhere... I did attempt to run it on a 486, a Really Long Time Ago. Its performance, at that time and on that system, could only be described as "glacial," even playing nethack. Slackware was much zippier, and even ran Netscape under X with acceptable speed for the day. Call me jaded.
I use Gentoo. I read Bugtraq, and pay attention to GLSAs. I only upgrade things that need upgrading, and I keep every single old package around, just in case. I've got an excellent perspective on what got changed, when, and why, on my server. I do not anticipate any software failures, but I'm ready for them.
1. Nonsense? From me? Perhaps. But JWZ rants much more prolifically about it than I ever could, here. I don't want my server's data married to the motherboard. And I'm not going to pain myself trying.
'Sides, CPUs caught up with hard drives a -long- time ago. The performance hit of software RAID-1 cost me perhaps $10 in CPU power. Whooptie shit.
2. Clearly. Now, tell me, how would this be any different if I had purchased an Proliant ML330 for more money and less function? Remember, I said nothing about any "datacenter enviroment." I just wrote a bit about how I put together a solitary mail server.
Jesus fuck.
There's enough meaningless officious buzzwords there to kill a whole team of horses.
What does it DO?
I don't know how the rest of the world does it, and I don't really care.
The mail server where I work used to consist of a 733MHz Celeron, branded E-Machines. It was a disused desktop machine from Joe Random (Joe, of course, has a shiny new Dell on his desk to replace it). Complete with a $3 PCI RTL8139 NIC, it was the epitome of cheap.
If any part failed, including the 175-Watt PSU, the machine would die completely.
It'd been that way since I started with the company.
I mentioned it to a higher-up, who happens to be a rather important salesman of moderate technical inclination, and whose sales depend primarily on reliable email.
He insisted that I do something about it, and so I began doing so.
I fought with the RAID adapter in a Proliant that we had spare before I realized why people generally loathe binary drivers under Linux. I looked for another way to connect the hard drives, but the box only had one(!) real IDE channel, and it was consumed by a pair of CD-ROM drives.
I sat and fathomed that for awhile: Big server box, stout steel constuction, Serverworks chipset, ECC RAM, huge cooling, 64-bit PCI, one P4 Xeon and room for a second. Unsupportable hardware RAID. One bloody IDE channel. No SCSI. The sound of nonsensical madness was deafening.
So I just built one. I had a few priorities, like redundant PSU cooling, Pentium 4 (I'm an AMD fanboy, but thermal throttling is your friend, even if the chip is vastly overpriced), redundant storage, good IO performance, and the ability to replace any (or every) part with something that can be sourced locally within an hour or so. Oh, and it has to be cheap.
I also made a list of non-priorities: Don't need a lot of number-crunching ability, don't need redundant PSUs, don't care about multiple CPUs.
"Who makes server mainboards," I asked myself. I answered myself with "Tyan."
I've never read anything but good stuff about Tyan. So I got one of their P4 boards. Not a "server" board, but one of their lesser (single-CPU) models which were hopefully developed by the same engineers. Two channels of SATA RAID, four DIMM slots, very few other built-in goodies, except for two additional PATA ports.
It supports dual-channel ECC RAM, so I picked up a couple of quarter-gig sticks of that. Could've gotten more, but remember, this is a -budget- server. (It seldom swaps, and when it does, the disks are fast enough to make it a non-issue.)
Also picked up a couple of Western Digital 80GB SATA drives, because Moving Parts Are Important, MMkay?, and at the time they were the only ones still offering a 5-year warranty. This machine is supposed to live longer than that before it is outgrown.
And for good measure, I included a Pioneer DVD-R for offline backups. I hate tapes.
I tossed it all in the cheapest black case I could find (newegg, $24, shipped). I threw away the included PSU and replaced it with a big Antec Truepower.
Killed the hardware RAID in favor of Linux's software RAID1. I have no intentions of ever marrying a computer's software to something as general and failure-prone as a modern motherboard - out-of-the-box RAID is a great way to fuck yourself at disaster-recovery time.
It runs Gentoo, and and filters and tosses mail something like twenty times the rate of the old E-Machines consumerbox (which had buried itself in backlogged mail a few times).
We've got redundancy of cooling and storage, we've got a graceful fail-safe on the CPU fan, and we've got a disaster plan that includes being able to find parts from the mom-and-pop shop down the street, or mounting the SATA drives in that wretched Proliant with a PCI controller, or (at worst) setting up the Proliant's DVD-ROM and one of its 80gig drives as master/slave and restoring from DVD-R.
I'm pleased with it. It was cheap. It went together slicker than greased shit. I don't think it's going to fail anytime soon, but if it does, at least I don't have to worry abou
Good stuff. But remember that WiMax right now consists of little more than marketingspeak, and they're not even trying to sell it to end-users yet. They're trying to sell it to themselves. NLOS? At tens-of-GHz? Erm...
So long as we're spouting off about a lot of hot air, I've got an idea.
I've been wanting a large-scale, spontaneous, wireless mesh network for a long, long time. A self-organizing clusterfuck of relatively inexpensive, mostly random gear, continously learning how to route packets from here to wherever most efficiently. Also, too: Removing The Man from the mix.
Altruistic? Not quite. The altruistic view, ala SeattleWireless and friends, dreams of a free mesh network, etc, lends itself to serious abuse, and is an example of communism. Communism works better with intangible software than for finite resources like bandwidth.
This other way involves quite a bit of money changing hands in a free market, little implicit trust (avoiding abuses of the sort that have been happening with SMTP for the past decade, and maybe even fixing spam), hordes of people being handed pinkslips because they've been made redundant by functional routing, and a real economy that would allow places like slashdot to survive by virtue of its existance instead of relying on an advertising market that will remain completely fucked for the foreseeable future.
We can proof-of-concept the RF end of this with existing technologies (ad-hoc 802.11), except for the magical uber-fast routing (which needs to be done in hardware that costs nothing extra and contains no moving parts, or the Joe Averages won't care enough to implement it).
I don't see how WiMax is going to do anything to help with that routing.
And there's still political, logistic, monetary, and business problems with the whole thing. I'll now go on at supreme length to describe the only feasible way I can imagine any of this shit actually working.
Local links in dense areas are easy and obvious. But what if you want to go further than across downtown Dallas?
Using Joe Average's Speakeasy DSL bandwidth to get out of the city is only a partial answer. Joe won't want to pay his DSL forever, if he can use some other Joe's DSL for free. The system then collapses. That's a problem. The solution is to provide Joe with some compensation.
The RF layer should be very frequency-agile and automatically so, such that if you can't get to where you're going at 11GHz it will automatically reduce frequency into real NLOS ranges (UHF TV spectrum, coming soon to a WLAN near you). WiMax, AFAIK, won't help with this. I don't know of anything, currently, that will. But without it, things will never be reliable in a chaotic mesh network.
The view from 300 feet up in the air atop a tower here in NW Ohio includes forrest (which completely covers most houses, even in the city), fields, radio towers, occasional tall buildings, and the tall streetlamps that ODOT likes to plant at rest areas, interchanges, and all along major highways in population centers. Every now and then, the highways themselves can be seen poking through the treeline (thanks to roadside deforrestation).
So that's what we've got to work with, at least here, for long-distance links.
The forrest obstructs. And nobody's going to have another Dust Bowl just for the sake of bandwidth.
The buildings also obstruct, but with the correct amount of bribery (or explaining The Greater Good) to the right people, can be turned into repeaters.
Government might be able to be talked into turning some lamp posts into access points, which will help along the routes betweeen population centers.
The cars on the highway are fine repeaters. Anecdotally, having done a lot of driving and seen a few MRTG plots, I'd say that traffic on I-75 happens in roughly the same patterns as local Internet traffic, which works out well.
And of course people will want bandwidth in cars and trucks. Not only does it keep t
Not to brag, as I have no idea how fast WiMax professes to be, but:
I've already got a functional network, where endpoints are all about 10 miles away from a central access point. It runs 5.7GHz Motorola Canopy, and shoots several megabits per second in any direction over flat terrain.
No funky amps, no wacky antennas, no broken FCC regs, and no lossy coaxial feedlines. Just a clear line of sight and some out-of-the-box Canopy gear. It works well enough that I don't particularly care that it is proprietary.
What advantage does WiMax offer? (And remember, over here in the real world, tens-of-GHz frequencies are usually not advantageous.)
You mean you didn't watch the webcast, like everyone else?
This is 2004. Try to stay current, willya?
I did this years ago, on a K6-2, using cron, LAME, and a bit of scripting to handle the encoding (which was nowhere near realtime on that CPU). Mid-side encoded, tweaked a bit - it sounded good.
I just plugged an old, standalone Kenwood tuner (which was free) into a (quite nice) $10 Yamaha XG sound card. And then it was done, finished, and completed.
If I wanted to play it in realtime, I just loaded the temporary WAV file in XMMS.
I see no reason why this wouldn't work on OS X.
An addendum to this hack (if one could even call it that) would be to use a different tuner that can be computer-controller (or Mindstorms to push the preset buttons). But, since there's only one FM station here with content that was worth recording, I never bothered.
Would someone please tell me what it is about this product that makes it front-page material?
(Oh. And those of you who think you're going to be able to record AM broadcasts anywhere near an actively-running PC, think again.)
Zalman has fanless water cooling system.
Else, I've got a P133 which has been running continuously for five years or so with only a large heatsink on the CPU (no fan), and a power supply fan that hardly turns.
It's a real trooper. I'd be happy to sell it to you.
I've been using afraid.org for about a year. Free dynamic DNS under a plethora of different domains - or you can bring your own.
Setup was quick, and I've never had any problems with it.
Supposedly, it's run by some sort of wacko DNS junkie.
I think by "Mature" you really meant to say "Elderly," or even "Sloth."
My wife bought a 2.4GHz Dell a couple of years ago, which ordinarily would be rather slow by now.
It's still fast.
Something wrong here, folks.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Of those 1.6m jobs, how many of them don't suck?
A recent trip to the grocery store taught me a few things:
The McDonald's on the way to the store has a sign that says "Now hiring - $8.50/hr". This is the same rate that they had posted in 1998. Wages for sucky jobs have thus not improved.
Coke and Pepsi are dramatically more expensive than they were six years ago. This is either due to inflation, or a relative decrease in salaries for soda-consuming people who are now spending relatively more of their money on important things like food and rent instead of sugar water.
Steady and strong? The lowest common denominators show otherwise, and the US is deporting labor to other countries as fast as possible. Who else should I be blaming, if not Junior? It sure as fuck isn't my fault - I'm doing the best I can on my end.
But none of this matters. The simple fact is that Americans are being forced to work harder and harder, but their quality of life is decreasing. I can name endless examples, but I shouldn't have to.
Just have a look around.
What's bizarre is that you've had XP lock up and crash on you.
Say what you will, but I use it rather frequently on a number of different machines, and I'm faced with supporting a couple of dozen XP machines at work. Applications may die from time to time, but I've never experienced a lockup under XP as long as the hardware is good and the spyware is absent.
If it is crashy for you under VMWare on a box where Linux is stable, I can only suspect that one or more of the following things is probably true:
- Operator error
- VMWare is buggy
- Bunk drivers
- Operator error
- VMWare is buggy
I'm sure that your commentary is a tremendous comfort for those among us who have dedicated most of their lives to working with computers, only to be laid off and become cab drivers.
Oh, and yeah - I blame Junior. Who in their right mind wouldn't?
Would you believe that I just reloaded Slashdot in Firefox, right as this article is posted, only to have the thing turn glacial and unusable?
You'd think we'd be farther along than this after a decade.
Let's hope that the new Firefox RC series Doesn't Suck. (That earlier versions tended to suck less in general than other browsers does not a non-sucky browser make.)
That seems like a lot of work. No, scratch that - is is a lot of work.
And if I want to change the default fonts (say, because I'm sick of I1|, '`, and {([ looking far too similar), what then? Do I get to hunt around in a dozen different places and change them all over again? Can I ever expect my users/customers to be able to do this by themselves?
At this point, why would I ever recommend any flavor of Linux in an enviroment where fonts were a concern? Why wouldn't I just sell them one of the two popular commercial operating systems that include good, easy-to-use font support out of the box (OS X, XP)?
Is the a reason why these settings don't exist solely in the form of X screen resources?
Bueler? Bueler? Anyone?
[rustling papers]
Your argument falls on its face in light of the fact that the number of electoral votes given to a State is determined by that State's population.
Therefore, South and North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, and probably a few other states, are vastly under-represented precisely because they they're a minority.
Thanks for playing, though. It's been fun.
Since your post contains nothing substantial but provable bullshit, and it got modded to +5 for some strange reason, here's your Basic Rebuttal :
1. Of course.
2. Of course not. Nobody will trust their machine to somehow automatically detect and skip commercials, particularly while in the process of burning to relatively expensive write-once media.
3. Maybe, but probably not. TFA does not mention what format the machine writes DVDs in. But it does say that the stuff on the hard drive is MPEG2, and we know the usual file size of that MPEG2 data[1] and how fast it'll burn.
4. If all you're storing is Big Files, and optimize sector allocation accordingly (not difficult - see TiVo's MFS, reading and writing 3 MPEG2 streams concurrently on a dog-slow Quantum LCT with an even slower Motorola 68k CPU and even less RAM), you'll not have much fragmentation. Ever.
5. Of course.
6. Duh.
7[1]. Easy. The box holds 709 hours in "EP" mode. It contains a a 400 gig drive. This gives us a filesize of about 560MB for one hour of EP video. If we're shooting EP video onto a garden-variety 8x DVD-R at just over 10 megabytes per second, 56 seconds is perfectly reasonable. My cheap-shit NEC 2510 will almost do this, using absolutely unoptimized burning software on a busy, garden-variety PC.
But, Panasonic has the unquestionably beneficial role of being in charge of producing the purpose-built hardware -and- the single-role software. Their product should be able to handle this task, in that time, without much difficulty at all.
And even if the marketing drivel -is- all lies, it's within a couple of seconds of the truth.