I lived in a ancient (by US standards) 2-story rental with plaster interior walls with metal lathe, and concrete block exterior. With an unfinished basement , a detached garage, and a huge yard.
Primary router/AP was in the middle of the basement, attached to the ceiling, because it was easy and invisible. It didn't adequately cover the house, and as the modulation rate ratcheted down to cover the slower/farther-away clients the nearby fast clients suffered as well.
So I fixed it: Another AP (-ish, I'm a Tomato and OpenWRT fan) went upstairs on the 2nd floor, and I was fortunate to find an easy path from the basement for cabling. This also let a heavy user upstairs plug in directly instead of using Wifi, saving wireless bandwidth.
And then, the garage and back yard. I tinker with and work on stuff, so the garage was important for lots of reasons. And we had a great garden way out back, where we found Pandora to be important. An old WRT54G and some kind of freebie (to me) forgettable router-box that would run OpenWRT formed a client/AP solution, which covered both handily without cabling to the main house (which can mean death to gear when lightning happens, unless fiber or other electrical isolation).
I could've done all of this with WDS, and done it badly. Instead, I had a system with decent frequency allocations that simply worked. (This was all 2.4GHz.)
With newer ideas about self-configuring dual-band mesh (to which WDS barely applies), I would have been able to accomplish something functionally identical using one box in the basement, one box upstairs, and one or two well-placed boxes in the garage.
And zero wires.
Absolute performance would've been worse than my complicated scheme, but most folks' don't care about that: They just want Netflix, Youtube, Facebook and gaming to work, and do so reliably and properly, whereby ensuring that the pipe to the ISP remains the bottleneck instead of the local WLAN is the first step toward victory.
(Now, of course, cabled is true victory: I pre-ordered the Ethernet adapter for Chromecast the moment I saw the announcement, just to keep that fucker off of my WLAN -- even though it was twenty unobstructed feet from the AP. But it's not always practical to cable everything, especially if you don't own the place.)
50 years ago, efficiency was shit -- as was power-to-weight ratio, and power-to-displacement ratio.
Modern engines are well ahead at every step of these games, including those from Mazda.
And nevermind that folks don't talk about bearings and rings and rebuilds anymore. It's just as possible to rebuild/refresh a new engine as it was one built 50 years ago when these terms were more common. It's just almost never necessary or desirable to do so, because things still tend to be working fine (or at least quite well) after a couple of hundred thousand miles of bad maintenance.
For years, I kept a USB drive on my keychain. Various styles. Their mounting systems always inevitably failed, and this usually left me without one until I replaced it or it was returned to me (which HAS happened, though I always nuke the data and restore from backup upon its return).
The ExtremKey seems cool, but has some problems. One, the business-end -- where the data is -- unscrews and is then left to freely disappear. The tailcap is cast rather than machined (unlike any cheap Maglight, ever), lending extra opportunity to munge the threads with repeated use. The mounting hole is tiny, and has very little material supporting it (as you noted).
But the biggest problem: It's big, so I'll be inclined to keep this on my keychain, which I wear on my beltloop, making all of the above even larger issues.
My answer for the past couple of years has been cheap, thin drives from PNY. The body is the same size of a normal USB A connector shell except for a (useless) plastic loop that I always cut off with a knife or a file.
I keep it in my wallet. It's safe there, or at least as safe as tons of way-more-important-to-me things. It's shock-mounted, being wrapped in leather. And it tends to stay as dry as I do (not that water is generally an issue for these things). And even if it falls apart (ie: the PCB slides out of the metal housing), I'll have all of the parts neatly contained in my wallet for recovery and/or repair.
It's also big enough for decent heat dissipation for lengthy writes.
The last one I bought was $10-ish at Wal-Mart of all places, and I forget if it was 32 or 64GB (and it really doesn't matter: either is very cheap, I think). Amazon has them for about $15, prime.
Throughput is less (rather surprisingly less -- I may want to check some things) with my QoS rules that group connections into individually-throttled categories, but bufferbloat is sane-ish (a brief peak at 250ms was observed, but otherwise under 100ms).
Without QoS, bufferbloat starts at around 1000ms (x10 increase!) and goes up from there.
I'm currently using Shibby's version of Tomato-USB on an overkill dual-core Asus router to accomplish this, though I have used other consumer-ish hardware with reasonable success (including the venerable WRT54G/L/GS) using similar software.
The trick, as I see it, is primarily to ensure that the cable modem (and whatever is directly upstream of it at the head-end) never see enough throughput for their buffers to begin filling by keeping all nearby bottlenecks under my own control.
The other benefit of QoS is that on heavily bandwidth-constrained networks, some tasks can be given higher priorities than other tasks, which is easy when we control the neck of the bottle.
I dated a girl for a bit who had the cheapest Internet she could get: 2Mbps down. Her kids hated it, and web browsing with tablets and phones and laptops was terrible for all of them if anyone was streaming a video (badly) or downloading (slowly). Loud banter over who was "hogging the Internet" and ruining gaming was common, and not unreasonable. It got worse when people would visit. It was really bad.
Best case: They were taking turns using the Internet. In 2014.
After observing this and suggesting she get faster Internet ("no, it's not important to me," she said) I gave her a router with Tomato, did some obvious QoS priorities that were tweaked for that particular situation, and voila: The games worked fine. Web browsing was always quite responsive. Youtube worked (worked meh, but worked), and downloads and BT didn't trash any of the above. Anyone could do whatever they wanted, and the inevitable slowdowns were graceful while responsiveness remained good. The gamer of the house didn't get upset anymore seemingly-randomly.
But that's just one success story. I've been doing tricks like this for over a decade on a myriad of non-enterprise networks, using cheap hardware and thoughtful software.
(Now it's time for someone to pop up and tell me that I've done it all wrong, and that my results are impossible. This always happens on/. when I write about using Tomato and QoS to solve real, practical problems. I'm ready.)
And if you forget to return it, whooooa buddy. Those fines come on quick: Fines are a big part of how a "free" public lending library keeps the lights on.
My own local library has a huge amount of current movies as well as tons of older ones. The new ones are on hold for weeks or months as they're borrowed by other patrons on a first-come, first-serve basis, and the popular old(er) movies aren't much better.
But $0.99 and done? I'm not rich, but if I think I lost a dollar in the couch somewhere, I'm not going to spend much time shaking it down to find it.
Everyone has moments of downtime. Even the famously rich and/or the richly celebrated. Money can't buy me love, and sad songs aren't usually written by happy people.
What bothers me most about this study is that it seems that the opposite correlation is also true: Depressed people might have a tendency to cling to more social networks than normal people. This is contrasted with the study's findings, wherein it is presumed that being on more social media networks creates depression.
Many of us ("us," as in humans) have clinical depression. It's treatable, sorta-kinda-but-not-really, and sometimes fatal, no matter how good that person's life might look to an objective outsider.
One example of a depressed person who had a very good lifestyle, by most standards, is Kurt Cobain: Self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head, very sad. This disease/illness/ailment/handicap/whatever is rather indiscriminate of wealth or status, social networks or not.
And none of this is new. The only information this study seems to actually bring to light is that there might be more clinically-depressed people out there than we've ever realized.
There's options here, and one of them is definitely the worst.
(Off tomorrow to troubleshoot a camera system that uses Silverlight for its only interface. Yes, really: A local Silverlight application. There are no words.)
Of course it can be done: It is simple plaintext in some manner of database, and/u/spez (being both CEO and having half a technological clue) can run amok.*
The only way around this is to cryptographically sign your messages.
If this were still the 90s, we'd be talking about that amongst all our other talk about RSA, patents, and encryption export bans. Alas, the only signed messages I ever see these days on a normal basis are on the gentoo-security mailing list, because we've generally forgotten just how nifty and awesome PGP-ish signing can be.
*: I've done similar things on my BBS...when I was 12. I skewed the odds in the online games I hosted, I snooped on presumably-private email, and I subtly changed public messages to suit my whimsy. I listened to 49MHz cordless phones with my scanner, and I purposefully interfered^H^H^H^H^Hacted with my neighbor's RF-over-powerline intercom system.
I don't do that sort of thing anymore because I found it all very boring even at the time, but also because I've grown to value privacy and sanctity in communications. A few years after that was I was running proper (for the time) paid-for mail and news servers on teh Intarwebs, and never once went poking at the mail spools, and never wanted to: Not my fucking business. I'm not 12 anymore./u/spez, meanwhile....
I self-check produce all the time. Usually beer, too, without real interaction: They just look up at me, see that I'm *probably* old enough to their Dad, push the button, and go back to their Facebook game.
Maybe crap beans, maybe just old beans that are open the atmosphere. Maybe poor servicing.
Any coffee snob will tell you that beans go bad within minutes/hours/days of roasting (depending on snobbery level).
As to servicing, there's only one or two commercial vendors for this stuff in this region. The coffee I get from these machines is always consistent and OK if from a machine that sees real volume and regular servicing (ie, fresh food is vended from the death wheel beside it, and coffee-drinking factory/commercial workers have no other source for coffee during their 8-hour shift).
This, contrasted with other coffee: I used to get a cup of coffee and sometimes a snack every morning before my work commute, always at the same place (which was the only place between my house and the highway).
Usually, the coffee was fine -- no it wasn't a delicacy of aromatics and fine notes, but functional and tasty. They sold plenty of it every morning, so it didn't hang around long. Sometimes, though, it just tasted like socks and was undrinkable swill.
There was nothing wrong with their process: Rinse things out, use automatic Bunn burr grinder to put fresh grounds into a clean filter and filter-holder, install said filter-holder into coffee Bunn maker with giant warming vat with a spout, push button to add hot water (and coffee!) into giant warming vat. Not ideal, but not horrible, and it tended to keep oxygen away from the brewed coffee (which is always good).
Then, one morning, the giant warming vat was empty, and I got to learn Socks Coffee happens.
I asked the nice lady at the register if she could make more coffee, and she looked at me sternly like I was jabbing her with the pokey end of an umbrella and wheeled around the counter. She pulled the filter-holder from the machine, inspected it for a moment, saw that it was full of used coffee grounds, put it back in and pushed the "Brew" button to purposefully fill the warmer-vat with second-run coffee.
Then she looked at me like, "Are you happy, now?"
I put my morning snack down and never spent another dime there.
Sometimes, people just don't give a shit -- whether with coffee-brewing machines, or any other aspect of life.
There's no good reason for the self-contained vending machines to produce bad coffee, though it isn't all that difficult to have them produce rather good coffee -- either. It just takes someone behind the scenes who gives a shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Speakers haven't changed much in decades, and 802.11g/n is fine for stereo audio.
Audio gear doesn't age nearly as fast as computers, or even cars.
It appears plain that Red Hat has spent plenty of money on virtualization with KVM and friends.
It is plain to me that KVM and friends work fine on every other distribution.
If my goal is a KVM host, why should I buy RHEL instead of just using it on some other distribution?
PS3 controllers, either wired or with the built-in Bluetooth, FTW.
We aren't even using 4g yet.
The marketing wank in this industry is thick and inscrutable.
All that I gleaned from TFS was "omg we figured out how multicast works, herp herp!"
Some people (most people?) don't build.
I lived in a ancient (by US standards) 2-story rental with plaster interior walls with metal lathe, and concrete block exterior. With an unfinished basement , a detached garage, and a huge yard.
Primary router/AP was in the middle of the basement, attached to the ceiling, because it was easy and invisible. It didn't adequately cover the house, and as the modulation rate ratcheted down to cover the slower/farther-away clients the nearby fast clients suffered as well.
So I fixed it: Another AP (-ish, I'm a Tomato and OpenWRT fan) went upstairs on the 2nd floor, and I was fortunate to find an easy path from the basement for cabling. This also let a heavy user upstairs plug in directly instead of using Wifi, saving wireless bandwidth.
And then, the garage and back yard. I tinker with and work on stuff, so the garage was important for lots of reasons. And we had a great garden way out back, where we found Pandora to be important. An old WRT54G and some kind of freebie (to me) forgettable router-box that would run OpenWRT formed a client/AP solution, which covered both handily without cabling to the main house (which can mean death to gear when lightning happens, unless fiber or other electrical isolation).
I could've done all of this with WDS, and done it badly. Instead, I had a system with decent frequency allocations that simply worked. (This was all 2.4GHz.)
With newer ideas about self-configuring dual-band mesh (to which WDS barely applies), I would have been able to accomplish something functionally identical using one box in the basement, one box upstairs, and one or two well-placed boxes in the garage.
And zero wires.
Absolute performance would've been worse than my complicated scheme, but most folks' don't care about that: They just want Netflix, Youtube, Facebook and gaming to work, and do so reliably and properly, whereby ensuring that the pipe to the ISP remains the bottleneck instead of the local WLAN is the first step toward victory.
(Now, of course, cabled is true victory: I pre-ordered the Ethernet adapter for Chromecast the moment I saw the announcement, just to keep that fucker off of my WLAN -- even though it was twenty unobstructed feet from the AP. But it's not always practical to cable everything, especially if you don't own the place.)
Badging.
And apparently it works, or you wouldn't have had a comment to reply to.
50 years ago, efficiency was shit -- as was power-to-weight ratio, and power-to-displacement ratio.
Modern engines are well ahead at every step of these games, including those from Mazda.
And nevermind that folks don't talk about bearings and rings and rebuilds anymore. It's just as possible to rebuild/refresh a new engine as it was one built 50 years ago when these terms were more common. It's just almost never necessary or desirable to do so, because things still tend to be working fine (or at least quite well) after a couple of hundred thousand miles of bad maintenance.
I looked briefly at that.
For years, I kept a USB drive on my keychain. Various styles. Their mounting systems always inevitably failed, and this usually left me without one until I replaced it or it was returned to me (which HAS happened, though I always nuke the data and restore from backup upon its return).
The ExtremKey seems cool, but has some problems. One, the business-end -- where the data is -- unscrews and is then left to freely disappear. The tailcap is cast rather than machined (unlike any cheap Maglight, ever), lending extra opportunity to munge the threads with repeated use. The mounting hole is tiny, and has very little material supporting it (as you noted).
But the biggest problem: It's big, so I'll be inclined to keep this on my keychain, which I wear on my beltloop, making all of the above even larger issues.
My answer for the past couple of years has been cheap, thin drives from PNY. The body is the same size of a normal USB A connector shell except for a (useless) plastic loop that I always cut off with a knife or a file.
I keep it in my wallet. It's safe there, or at least as safe as tons of way-more-important-to-me things. It's shock-mounted, being wrapped in leather. And it tends to stay as dry as I do (not that water is generally an issue for these things). And even if it falls apart (ie: the PCB slides out of the metal housing), I'll have all of the parts neatly contained in my wallet for recovery and/or repair.
It's also big enough for decent heat dissipation for lengthy writes.
The last one I bought was $10-ish at Wal-Mart of all places, and I forget if it was 32 or 64GB (and it really doesn't matter: either is very cheap, I think). Amazon has them for about $15, prime.
Zero complaints.
I'm fine with a robot that automatically kills roads; surely, this can only hasten the arrival teleportation as a practical method of transit.
Mom, someone on the Internet was mean to me!
They're all version 1 devices, though.
There's never a subtle revision to fix things up. It's always a complete overhaul, v1.0 device.
More like: Plug in thumb drive. Key secret incantation into remote. Wait for the process to finish. Remove thumb drive. Bill customer
There are criminals inside of my walled garden? Preposterous!
I have a spare Asus RT-N16.
Where do I get started with Cake?
I'll need to see your CCNA before I can accept your retort.
I thought the main benefit of a Google phone was that it worked well, and tended to be cheap.
This one isn't cheap, and doesn't work well.
You're right, of course. The trouble is, the latency increases aren't reasonable for common consumer networks under load.
Two speedtests I just did on my lightly-loaded hardwired home network (30Mbsp cable from Time Warner):
With QoS
Without QoS
Throughput is less (rather surprisingly less -- I may want to check some things) with my QoS rules that group connections into individually-throttled categories, but bufferbloat is sane-ish (a brief peak at 250ms was observed, but otherwise under 100ms).
Without QoS, bufferbloat starts at around 1000ms (x10 increase!) and goes up from there.
I'm currently using Shibby's version of Tomato-USB on an overkill dual-core Asus router to accomplish this, though I have used other consumer-ish hardware with reasonable success (including the venerable WRT54G/L/GS) using similar software.
The trick, as I see it, is primarily to ensure that the cable modem (and whatever is directly upstream of it at the head-end) never see enough throughput for their buffers to begin filling by keeping all nearby bottlenecks under my own control.
The other benefit of QoS is that on heavily bandwidth-constrained networks, some tasks can be given higher priorities than other tasks, which is easy when we control the neck of the bottle.
I dated a girl for a bit who had the cheapest Internet she could get: 2Mbps down. Her kids hated it, and web browsing with tablets and phones and laptops was terrible for all of them if anyone was streaming a video (badly) or downloading (slowly). Loud banter over who was "hogging the Internet" and ruining gaming was common, and not unreasonable. It got worse when people would visit. It was really bad.
Best case: They were taking turns using the Internet. In 2014.
After observing this and suggesting she get faster Internet ("no, it's not important to me," she said) I gave her a router with Tomato, did some obvious QoS priorities that were tweaked for that particular situation, and voila: The games worked fine. Web browsing was always quite responsive. Youtube worked (worked meh, but worked), and downloads and BT didn't trash any of the above. Anyone could do whatever they wanted, and the inevitable slowdowns were graceful while responsiveness remained good. The gamer of the house didn't get upset anymore seemingly-randomly.
But that's just one success story. I've been doing tricks like this for over a decade on a myriad of non-enterprise networks, using cheap hardware and thoughtful software.
(Now it's time for someone to pop up and tell me that I've done it all wrong, and that my results are impossible. This always happens on /. when I write about using Tomato and QoS to solve real, practical problems. I'm ready.)
Yep.
And if you forget to return it, whooooa buddy. Those fines come on quick: Fines are a big part of how a "free" public lending library keeps the lights on.
My own local library has a huge amount of current movies as well as tons of older ones. The new ones are on hold for weeks or months as they're borrowed by other patrons on a first-come, first-serve basis, and the popular old(er) movies aren't much better.
But $0.99 and done? I'm not rich, but if I think I lost a dollar in the couch somewhere, I'm not going to spend much time shaking it down to find it.
Everyone has moments of downtime. Even the famously rich and/or the richly celebrated. Money can't buy me love, and sad songs aren't usually written by happy people.
What bothers me most about this study is that it seems that the opposite correlation is also true: Depressed people might have a tendency to cling to more social networks than normal people. This is contrasted with the study's findings, wherein it is presumed that being on more social media networks creates depression.
Many of us ("us," as in humans) have clinical depression. It's treatable, sorta-kinda-but-not-really, and sometimes fatal, no matter how good that person's life might look to an objective outsider.
One example of a depressed person who had a very good lifestyle, by most standards, is Kurt Cobain: Self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head, very sad. This disease/illness/ailment/handicap/whatever is rather indiscriminate of wealth or status, social networks or not.
And none of this is new. The only information this study seems to actually bring to light is that there might be more clinically-depressed people out there than we've ever realized.
Yeah. Exactly.
There's options here, and one of them is definitely the worst.
(Off tomorrow to troubleshoot a camera system that uses Silverlight for its only interface. Yes, really: A local Silverlight application. There are no words.)
Spotify needs DRM to keep their streams from being perfectly ripped.
DRM and open-source are somewhat incompatible.
It's not a Spotify problem, but a reality problem.
My current boss goes on passionate and persuasive mini-rants about integrity, personal responsibility, and mutual respect.
He's also a convicted felon. Insurance fraud, before my tenure there.
tl;dr. Bosses are humans, too, and he's incidentally the best boss I've ever had.
Of course it can be done: It is simple plaintext in some manner of database, and /u/spez (being both CEO and having half a technological clue) can run amok.*
The only way around this is to cryptographically sign your messages.
If this were still the 90s, we'd be talking about that amongst all our other talk about RSA, patents, and encryption export bans. Alas, the only signed messages I ever see these days on a normal basis are on the gentoo-security mailing list, because we've generally forgotten just how nifty and awesome PGP-ish signing can be.
*: I've done similar things on my BBS...when I was 12. I skewed the odds in the online games I hosted, I snooped on presumably-private email, and I subtly changed public messages to suit my whimsy. I listened to 49MHz cordless phones with my scanner, and I purposefully interfered^H^H^H^H^Hacted with my neighbor's RF-over-powerline intercom system.
I don't do that sort of thing anymore because I found it all very boring even at the time, but also because I've grown to value privacy and sanctity in communications. A few years after that was I was running proper (for the time) paid-for mail and news servers on teh Intarwebs, and never once went poking at the mail spools, and never wanted to: Not my fucking business. I'm not 12 anymore. /u/spez, meanwhile....
I self-check produce all the time. Usually beer, too, without real interaction: They just look up at me, see that I'm *probably* old enough to their Dad, push the button, and go back to their Facebook game.
Maybe crap beans, maybe just old beans that are open the atmosphere. Maybe poor servicing.
Any coffee snob will tell you that beans go bad within minutes/hours/days of roasting (depending on snobbery level).
As to servicing, there's only one or two commercial vendors for this stuff in this region. The coffee I get from these machines is always consistent and OK if from a machine that sees real volume and regular servicing (ie, fresh food is vended from the death wheel beside it, and coffee-drinking factory/commercial workers have no other source for coffee during their 8-hour shift).
This, contrasted with other coffee: I used to get a cup of coffee and sometimes a snack every morning before my work commute, always at the same place (which was the only place between my house and the highway).
Usually, the coffee was fine -- no it wasn't a delicacy of aromatics and fine notes, but functional and tasty. They sold plenty of it every morning, so it didn't hang around long. Sometimes, though, it just tasted like socks and was undrinkable swill.
There was nothing wrong with their process: Rinse things out, use automatic Bunn burr grinder to put fresh grounds into a clean filter and filter-holder, install said filter-holder into coffee Bunn maker with giant warming vat with a spout, push button to add hot water (and coffee!) into giant warming vat. Not ideal, but not horrible, and it tended to keep oxygen away from the brewed coffee (which is always good).
Then, one morning, the giant warming vat was empty, and I got to learn Socks Coffee happens.
I asked the nice lady at the register if she could make more coffee, and she looked at me sternly like I was jabbing her with the pokey end of an umbrella and wheeled around the counter. She pulled the filter-holder from the machine, inspected it for a moment, saw that it was full of used coffee grounds, put it back in and pushed the "Brew" button to purposefully fill the warmer-vat with second-run coffee.
Then she looked at me like, "Are you happy, now?"
I put my morning snack down and never spent another dime there.
Sometimes, people just don't give a shit -- whether with coffee-brewing machines, or any other aspect of life.
There's no good reason for the self-contained vending machines to produce bad coffee, though it isn't all that difficult to have them produce rather good coffee -- either. It just takes someone behind the scenes who gives a shit.