If the keyboard is only used for typing passwords, then yes, you probably win.
However, if (like most computer users) you type your password a few times a day, in between large periods of typing text -- you lose.
A listener can analyze the rest of the text for known digraphs, etc., and then use that frequency information to crack the hard bits (your password). Sure, they might only be able to narrow it down to a hundred or so possibilities, but that's better than brute force.
So if you have GAIM running and don't realize it, and you click on the GAIM icon again (say you haven't had your morning coffee yet), you want another GAIM process?
I'm not saying you're wrong -- this may very well be what you want -- but I'm curious. I don't think the 80/20 rule's going to be very kind to this feature.
The same goes with computers. Your example, of an "instance", I consider not that bad... How do you phrase that better? "GAIM is already running"?
No.
Instead, you pop up the existing GAIM instance.
If the user clicked on the GAIM icon, s/he wanted GAIM. Give them GAIM. The problem in the dialog is a red herring; the problem is in the implementation.
I don't see how the linked document suggests the stack is sub-par. All it says is that the guy wants money to fund optimization, like PHK's done before.
If the page started with "OMG Linux is fastar than us!" then, yes. But I don't see how you reached your conclusions based on this material.
Well, that's kind of silly. If one is legitimate and another backed by, say, Google or MSN, clearly they don't cancel each other out.
Studies can't really cancel each other out. If, in the presence of both studies, neither of them count, then they were probably both wrong to begin with.
And it is possible for both to be right, if they use different methods for sampling or measurement.
I really can't understand why people still drool over this POS hardware.
Because my G4 iBook does exactly what I need it to, and hasn't yet suffered from this Big Scary Logic Board problem?
This is like saying "I don't know why people still buy iPods, FYI their batteries only last 18 months!" Sure, that may be true for some, but my friend's four-year-old first-gen iPod is still going strong.
Because Linux on the desktop is really unpleasant for most people, particularly novices? Even on Fedora with the default settings, you have to set your HTTP proxy in many different places. (Once in GConf, once in Mozilla, once for the RedHat Network, and god forbid you start Konqueror -- that's a separate setting too.)
Having worked for a few years to set up novices with Linux on the desktop, I can say it's got a ways to go. I'm getting tired of the kneejerk "THEY SHOULD RUN LEENOOKS" posts whenever anyone mentions OS X; it's demonstrative of someone who hasn't used both Linux and OS X for any period of time.
I've been watching this pretty closely, preparing for a masters program in a related topic. This isn't directly related to my research, so take it more as an idea than a finding, but:
Information overload will only affect certain personality types. There are those of us who inhale Google daily. Recent example: "I went home last night, discovered Hibernate, learned it, and converted our 70,000-line service center app to use it. Want the diffs?" Yeah, there are people who do this; we had it happen at work about a week ago.
Others simply cannot absorb and process information that quickly. These people are potential info-burnouts. Tends to correlate, in my experience, with a general unwillingness to learn new programming languages or adapt to new systems. They're not being sticks-in-the-proverbial-mud -- they understand that they simply can't cram it into their brain quickly enough, and it often makes them anxious.
There are a lot more types of programmers than that, but you get the idea. In my case, I was trained from an early age to work around my ADD by constantly juggling large amounts of data. (My parents are ADD programmers too.) I have the opposite problem: my productivity declines as my tasks get simpler. It becomes too easy to become distracted.
My point: don't reduce the problem of burnout. There are a lot more variables than just information.
I suspect work conditions have far more to do with burnout and depression. Programmers tend to be expected to work long hours, and at least in my experience, a surprising percentage of programming shops have hostile, competitive, or abusive environments.
This thread, so far, seems to be filled mostly with "Ah! Someone's doing something differently than UNIX has for 30 years! My knee is jerking!" So I feel I should respond.
launchd is neat. It's not simply a different way of doing the same things, it lets you do different things.
Like automatically evaluating dependencies between daemons, starting them in the right order, and running them in parallel if needed. FreeBSD's the only other OSS system I've ever seen do this; Gentoo does the dependencies but not the parallel startup. (Which is annoying while it's, say, trying to get an address from a nonexistent DHCP server.) Long story short, it dramatically reduces boot time, while eliminating dependency hacks like runlevels and numbered scripts. (Not that BSD had them.)
For those of you who posted without reading the manpage (or administering an OSX system), it also lets you do init-style startup tasks on a per-user basis. You can configure it to start daemons and other processes on the behalf of users as the log in, and shut them down -- gracefully, not by TERM; KILL -- when the user logs out.
Anyone who's ever dealt with the myriad of hacks to get ssh-agent in place will understand why this is good.
There's a lot of resentment these days toward anyone who does something that's perceived as "not the UNIX way." Change is the only way to innovation, people; perhaps the UNIX way is broader than you thought?
You say array access, I say function invocation...
on
The Best of Verity Stob
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Disclaimer: I've been up to my nose in language design lately, as a hobby to distract me from OLTP work....yes, I'm a geek.
The reviewer quotes a passage where the author complains about array accesses and function invocations in VB. Now, as a former VB wonk, I hate it as much as anyone outside of the FSF, but I'm not sure I agree with this.
From a certain point of view, having array accesses and function invocations be indistinguishable is a good thing. I mean, what is an array, if not a function over an integer domain that produces discrete results? I think we've all substituted sine functions with lookup tables before. (Okay, maybe not everybody.)
VB even goes a bit farther, using the function invocation syntax (e.g. "F(x)") only for functions that return values. Void functions (subroutines) are called as "F x". At least back when I was doing VB. So really, functions are more like arrays to the programmer than they are subroutines.
On the other hand, as a Smalltalk fan, I'd argue that having a dedicated array-accessor syntax is just sugar anyway. I'm going to crawl back under my desk now.
That's one of the many reasons why some APIs are left undocumented: because they are expected to be unstable.
Can't really blame Apple on this one. They didn't publish the API, and changed it in Tiger to a more flexible three-part solution. Eventually they may decide the design's a good one and publish the API.
Fonts are programs, as odd as that may sound. Postscript fonts are the obvious examples here, but Truetype fonts are also interpreted bytecode.
Whether or not documents are programs is debatable, but they are information that makes a computer behave a certain way. They take interpreter software (your reader software), but then, so does Java or Perl.
So if you're sufficiently nutty (and if you're involved in interpreting the GPL, you will be), using a font in a document is a lot like linking.
Now, you're right, generally you do distribute the 'source.' However, it's possible to embed fonts into a document (in a PDF, for example) and strip out the unused characters, which wouldn't be a full copy of the source. Moreover, you could print or otherwise rasterize the document, thereby losing the font source -- which is basically equivalent to compiling the source into binaries.
IMHO, this is all really insane. But I don't release code under the GPL anyway.
Linux does do a damn good job of file icon previews (when it's a file that your file manager recognizes), but it's not really an original feature.
Mac OS has had per-file icons, typically used by apps to define a preview, since at least System 7 (my first experiences). It's generally only used by image apps, however; turns out the name and a nice icon representing the file type is frequently more informative.
Next thing you know, there'll be a hot new innovation -- resource forks! *grin*
As an Arizonan first and a programmer second, I think history is going to look back on DST as essentially equivalent to the (anecdotal) story of lawmakers legislating pi to 3.
Arizona doesn't do DST. I've only visited areas that observed daylight savings time, and it never ceases to amuse me. The conversations usually go like this: Q. Why do you keep changing your clocks around? A. To get more daylight! Q. So changing your clock alters the rotation or axial tilt of the Earth? A. No, see, normally it would get dark at 7. Now it gets dark at 8! Q. But the sun doesn't rise until 8 or 9 AM. When you need to make your blanket longer, do you cut a foot off one end and sew it onto the other? A. But...*gzert*...more daylight! More daylight! Q. Why don't you just wake up an hour earlier, if you want more daylight? A. *gzert* *pop*
(Okay, they don't actually short circuit, but they tend to run out of coherent arguments. It seems most people haven't really thought about this.)
Add to this my programmer's view of time (as a monotonically increasing quantity [relativity aside] unrelated to human foibles) and this seems a lot like Congress trying to legislate the tides, or apply our IP laws in Norway.
Assuming that's your real passphrase, and assuming you've continued the English sentence as a mnemonic device, you've really only got five Xs there, since half of them are a four-letter word followed by 's'. Judging from the sentence, it's probably a number, either 'four' or 'zero'.
If one of those is correct, there's the five decimal digits to bruteforce, giving a total of 100,000 possibilities.
Even if they're not correct, only the digits need be bruteforced; the remaining characters can be dictionary-searched.
Not sure where you got the 'near a googolplex' figure. It's an English phrase with interspersed decimal digits.
Radio waves are radio waves. Once your frequency, modulation system, etc. are documented, anyone can fake your radio waves.
It's far easier to secure the higher layers (in the OSI sense) -- the data you're sending over the radio waves.
Authenticating this is pretty trivial, from a crypto standpoint. The simplest approach is to encrypt your data with a shared key; more robust approaches might include signing unencrypted data with a private/public keypair, etc. This would also introduce some noise resistance, since you could tell if the data's been corrupted by checking the signature. (Though for non-malicious interference, you're probably better off using a redundancy check of some sort.)
I see a lot of posts on this thread complaining of censorship and so on. I also recognize that the ISPs are technologically incapable of accurate filtering of this kind.
So, I propose an easier solution.
I cannot guarantee that my blog, homepage, etc. will not contain content that might be considered by some nut to be harmful to children. Therefore, I'll simply block all addresses that are identifiably Utah-based from accessing my site. The ISPs win, the Utah citizens win....what? Some Utah citizens might actually want to access my content? Should've written to your governor.:-)
I wish the article had provided a bit more info on what the specific chemicals were.
In my family, we've traditionally used B-complex to ward off mosquitos. If you take a certain amount (more than usual, not enough to stink and turn orange), mosquitos ignore you completely.
Personally, I like to have a nice, working, manufacturer supported camera more than I like having a 1337 LEENOOKS-2000 fuzzy image device. But then, I also stopped using Gimp and Linux in favor of Mac and Photoshop, so flame on.
I really hope the parent was tongue-in-cheek. In terms of a modern digital camera, my DiMAGE A2:
1. Turn it into a temporary USB data storage device if it has a USB port on it
Check.
2. If it has audio capability, turn it into a digital audio recorder that works kind of like a mini-cassette recorder (ie. shitty quality, but lots of record time)
Check. The video function works fine for this, and if you leave the lens cap on, the black-frame video takes up almost no space.
3. Make it into a "cam" that can be attached to your PC for live web cam stuff
Check.
4. Turn it into a video recorder for short clips in a format like MJPEG
Check. You have, y'know, used a digital camera, right? MJPEG's been the main video capture format for years, only now being supplanted with MPEG4.
7. Set it up for motion sensitive mode. It will span a picture only when something in the field of view moves 8. Or similar to above, in motion sensitive mode with USB, it could just dump the image straight to your PC whenever there is motion. Imagine combining this with a laptop to work as a spycam...
Check, check.
That said:
5. Make it into an e-book reader that can read PDF or Postscript docs (after all many digital cameras have scroll wheels and multiple menu buttons, etc...) 6. Play some old school video games on them: Space Invaders, Pac Man, maybe even Doom. Doom's been done before... 9. MP3 or Ogg Vobis player the works from CD or Flash media (again if your camera has audio capability) 10. A USB video monitor. Combine your camera with a Mac Mini and a foldup KB and mouse and you have a pretty compact but powerful system for travelling. (Yes, I don't mind squinting at small screens)
The fascination people have with putting Ogg/DOOM/eBooks on random objects amuses the hell out of me. I have a Vorbis player on my iPaq, and an eBook reader on my iPod, and never use either of them. As for porting games...oi. I recommend a GameBoy.
In response to the original poster, my camera's a MIPS, according to my firmware disassembly. Here's something I'm amazed nobody has mentioned:
My camera's firmware contains a TCP stack, PPP implementation, SMTP implementation, and dinky FTP server. It's pretty clear that the manufacturer intends (or intended) to release a modem of some sort. Yet, nobody seems to have mentioned network connectivity!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no...
If the keyboard is only used for typing passwords, then yes, you probably win.
However, if (like most computer users) you type your password a few times a day, in between large periods of typing text -- you lose.
A listener can analyze the rest of the text for known digraphs, etc., and then use that frequency information to crack the hard bits (your password). Sure, they might only be able to narrow it down to a hundred or so possibilities, but that's better than brute force.
So if you have GAIM running and don't realize it, and you click on the GAIM icon again (say you haven't had your morning coffee yet), you want another GAIM process?
I'm not saying you're wrong -- this may very well be what you want -- but I'm curious. I don't think the 80/20 rule's going to be very kind to this feature.
No.
Instead, you pop up the existing GAIM instance.
If the user clicked on the GAIM icon, s/he wanted GAIM. Give them GAIM. The problem in the dialog is a red herring; the problem is in the implementation.
I don't see how the linked document suggests the stack is sub-par. All it says is that the guy wants money to fund optimization, like PHK's done before.
If the page started with "OMG Linux is fastar than us!" then, yes. But I don't see how you reached your conclusions based on this material.
Well, that's kind of silly. If one is legitimate and another backed by, say, Google or MSN, clearly they don't cancel each other out.
Studies can't really cancel each other out. If, in the presence of both studies, neither of them count, then they were probably both wrong to begin with.
And it is possible for both to be right, if they use different methods for sampling or measurement.
Hey, a Slashdot toolbar! It could make kneejerk inflammatory comments about whatever you're browsing for, without actually reading the web pages!
:-)
Just think how much time it would save! I'd never have to post on Slashdot again!
Because my G4 iBook does exactly what I need it to, and hasn't yet suffered from this Big Scary Logic Board problem?
This is like saying "I don't know why people still buy iPods, FYI their batteries only last 18 months!" Sure, that may be true for some, but my friend's four-year-old first-gen iPod is still going strong.
GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!
Oh, gee, I dunno...
Because Linux on the desktop is really unpleasant for most people, particularly novices? Even on Fedora with the default settings, you have to set your HTTP proxy in many different places. (Once in GConf, once in Mozilla, once for the RedHat Network, and god forbid you start Konqueror -- that's a separate setting too.)
Having worked for a few years to set up novices with Linux on the desktop, I can say it's got a ways to go. I'm getting tired of the kneejerk "THEY SHOULD RUN LEENOOKS" posts whenever anyone mentions OS X; it's demonstrative of someone who hasn't used both Linux and OS X for any period of time.
I've been watching this pretty closely, preparing for a masters program in a related topic. This isn't directly related to my research, so take it more as an idea than a finding, but:
Information overload will only affect certain personality types. There are those of us who inhale Google daily. Recent example: "I went home last night, discovered Hibernate, learned it, and converted our 70,000-line service center app to use it. Want the diffs?" Yeah, there are people who do this; we had it happen at work about a week ago.
Others simply cannot absorb and process information that quickly. These people are potential info-burnouts. Tends to correlate, in my experience, with a general unwillingness to learn new programming languages or adapt to new systems. They're not being sticks-in-the-proverbial-mud -- they understand that they simply can't cram it into their brain quickly enough, and it often makes them anxious.
There are a lot more types of programmers than that, but you get the idea. In my case, I was trained from an early age to work around my ADD by constantly juggling large amounts of data. (My parents are ADD programmers too.) I have the opposite problem: my productivity declines as my tasks get simpler. It becomes too easy to become distracted.
My point: don't reduce the problem of burnout. There are a lot more variables than just information.
I suspect work conditions have far more to do with burnout and depression. Programmers tend to be expected to work long hours, and at least in my experience, a surprising percentage of programming shops have hostile, competitive, or abusive environments.
This thread, so far, seems to be filled mostly with "Ah! Someone's doing something differently than UNIX has for 30 years! My knee is jerking!" So I feel I should respond.
launchd is neat. It's not simply a different way of doing the same things, it lets you do different things.
Like automatically evaluating dependencies between daemons, starting them in the right order, and running them in parallel if needed. FreeBSD's the only other OSS system I've ever seen do this; Gentoo does the dependencies but not the parallel startup. (Which is annoying while it's, say, trying to get an address from a nonexistent DHCP server.) Long story short, it dramatically reduces boot time, while eliminating dependency hacks like runlevels and numbered scripts. (Not that BSD had them.)
For those of you who posted without reading the manpage (or administering an OSX system), it also lets you do init-style startup tasks on a per-user basis. You can configure it to start daemons and other processes on the behalf of users as the log in, and shut them down -- gracefully, not by TERM; KILL -- when the user logs out.
Anyone who's ever dealt with the myriad of hacks to get ssh-agent in place will understand why this is good.
There's a lot of resentment these days toward anyone who does something that's perceived as "not the UNIX way." Change is the only way to innovation, people; perhaps the UNIX way is broader than you thought?
Disclaimer: I've been up to my nose in language design lately, as a hobby to distract me from OLTP work. ...yes, I'm a geek.
The reviewer quotes a passage where the author complains about array accesses and function invocations in VB. Now, as a former VB wonk, I hate it as much as anyone outside of the FSF, but I'm not sure I agree with this.
From a certain point of view, having array accesses and function invocations be indistinguishable is a good thing. I mean, what is an array, if not a function over an integer domain that produces discrete results? I think we've all substituted sine functions with lookup tables before. (Okay, maybe not everybody.)
VB even goes a bit farther, using the function invocation syntax (e.g. "F(x)") only for functions that return values. Void functions (subroutines) are called as "F x". At least back when I was doing VB. So really, functions are more like arrays to the programmer than they are subroutines.
On the other hand, as a Smalltalk fan, I'd argue that having a dedicated array-accessor syntax is just sugar anyway. I'm going to crawl back under my desk now.
It's an undocumented API.
That's one of the many reasons why some APIs are left undocumented: because they are expected to be unstable.
Can't really blame Apple on this one. They didn't publish the API, and changed it in Tiger to a more flexible three-part solution. Eventually they may decide the design's a good one and publish the API.
Until then, use it at your own risk.
If we don't have time for effective preparations, where do I donate toward the ineffective preparations?
I, for one, want a massive Wile E. Coyote-style flag to pop out of the Earth immediately before the asteroid hits. Preferably reading "Yipe!"
Fonts are programs, as odd as that may sound. Postscript fonts are the obvious examples here, but Truetype fonts are also interpreted bytecode.
Whether or not documents are programs is debatable, but they are information that makes a computer behave a certain way. They take interpreter software (your reader software), but then, so does Java or Perl.
So if you're sufficiently nutty (and if you're involved in interpreting the GPL, you will be), using a font in a document is a lot like linking.
Now, you're right, generally you do distribute the 'source.' However, it's possible to embed fonts into a document (in a PDF, for example) and strip out the unused characters, which wouldn't be a full copy of the source. Moreover, you could print or otherwise rasterize the document, thereby losing the font source -- which is basically equivalent to compiling the source into binaries.
IMHO, this is all really insane. But I don't release code under the GPL anyway.
Linux does do a damn good job of file icon previews (when it's a file that your file manager recognizes), but it's not really an original feature.
Mac OS has had per-file icons, typically used by apps to define a preview, since at least System 7 (my first experiences). It's generally only used by image apps, however; turns out the name and a nice icon representing the file type is frequently more informative.
Next thing you know, there'll be a hot new innovation -- resource forks! *grin*
As an Arizonan first and a programmer second, I think history is going to look back on DST as essentially equivalent to the (anecdotal) story of lawmakers legislating pi to 3.
Arizona doesn't do DST. I've only visited areas that observed daylight savings time, and it never ceases to amuse me. The conversations usually go like this:
Q. Why do you keep changing your clocks around?
A. To get more daylight!
Q. So changing your clock alters the rotation or axial tilt of the Earth?
A. No, see, normally it would get dark at 7. Now it gets dark at 8!
Q. But the sun doesn't rise until 8 or 9 AM. When you need to make your blanket longer, do you cut a foot off one end and sew it onto the other?
A. But...*gzert*...more daylight! More daylight!
Q. Why don't you just wake up an hour earlier, if you want more daylight?
A. *gzert* *pop*
(Okay, they don't actually short circuit, but they tend to run out of coherent arguments. It seems most people haven't really thought about this.)
Add to this my programmer's view of time (as a monotonically increasing quantity [relativity aside] unrelated to human foibles) and this seems a lot like Congress trying to legislate the tides, or apply our IP laws in Norway.
(Oh, wait. Heh.)
Assuming that's your real passphrase, and assuming you've continued the English sentence as a mnemonic device, you've really only got five Xs there, since half of them are a four-letter word followed by 's'. Judging from the sentence, it's probably a number, either 'four' or 'zero'.
If one of those is correct, there's the five decimal digits to bruteforce, giving a total of 100,000 possibilities.
Even if they're not correct, only the digits need be bruteforced; the remaining characters can be dictionary-searched.
Not sure where you got the 'near a googolplex' figure. It's an English phrase with interspersed decimal digits.
Radio waves are radio waves. Once your frequency, modulation system, etc. are documented, anyone can fake your radio waves.
It's far easier to secure the higher layers (in the OSI sense) -- the data you're sending over the radio waves.
Authenticating this is pretty trivial, from a crypto standpoint. The simplest approach is to encrypt your data with a shared key; more robust approaches might include signing unencrypted data with a private/public keypair, etc. This would also introduce some noise resistance, since you could tell if the data's been corrupted by checking the signature. (Though for non-malicious interference, you're probably better off using a redundancy check of some sort.)
Good luck!
I see a lot of posts on this thread complaining of censorship and so on. I also recognize that the ISPs are technologically incapable of accurate filtering of this kind.
...what? Some Utah citizens might actually want to access my content? Should've written to your governor. :-)
So, I propose an easier solution.
I cannot guarantee that my blog, homepage, etc. will not contain content that might be considered by some nut to be harmful to children. Therefore, I'll simply block all addresses that are identifiably Utah-based from accessing my site. The ISPs win, the Utah citizens win.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like this trend of splitting an article into tiny parts is getting worse.
One of the 'pages' in TFA contains a paragraph. About eight to ten lines. Then you click Next and wait for it to load.
Perhaps this is to increase ad impressions, I don't know. But it got annoying enough that I simply stopped reading.
In a few years, I'll hate to see how far we've come.
In
*click*
this
*click*
article
*click*
Wrong again! When discussing Microsoft on Slashdot, the correct acronym is 'ICBM.'
While I agree with most of your post, this is incorrect. The iMac G5s use standard 184-pin DDR DIMMs.
The G4's might've used SO-DIMMs, but I haven't had one open.
I wish the article had provided a bit more info on what the specific chemicals were.
In my family, we've traditionally used B-complex to ward off mosquitos. If you take a certain amount (more than usual, not enough to stink and turn orange), mosquitos ignore you completely.
Wonder if it's related.
Personally, I like to have a nice, working, manufacturer supported camera more than I like having a 1337 LEENOOKS-2000 fuzzy image device. But then, I also stopped using Gimp and Linux in favor of Mac and Photoshop, so flame on.
I really hope the parent was tongue-in-cheek. In terms of a modern digital camera, my DiMAGE A2:
1. Turn it into a temporary USB data storage device if it has a USB port on it
Check.
2. If it has audio capability, turn it into a digital audio recorder that works kind of like a mini-cassette recorder (ie. shitty quality, but lots of record time)
Check. The video function works fine for this, and if you leave the lens cap on, the black-frame video takes up almost no space.
3. Make it into a "cam" that can be attached to your PC for live web cam stuff
Check.
4. Turn it into a video recorder for short clips in a format like MJPEG
Check. You have, y'know, used a digital camera, right? MJPEG's been the main video capture format for years, only now being supplanted with MPEG4.
7. Set it up for motion sensitive mode. It will span a picture only when something in the field of view moves
8. Or similar to above, in motion sensitive mode with USB, it could just dump the image straight to your PC whenever there is motion. Imagine combining this with a laptop to work as a spycam...
Check, check.
That said:
5. Make it into an e-book reader that can read PDF or Postscript docs (after all many digital cameras have scroll wheels and multiple menu buttons, etc...)
6. Play some old school video games on them: Space Invaders, Pac Man, maybe even Doom. Doom's been done before...
9. MP3 or Ogg Vobis player the works from CD or Flash media (again if your camera has audio capability)
10. A USB video monitor. Combine your camera with a Mac Mini and a foldup KB and mouse and you have a pretty compact but powerful system for travelling. (Yes, I don't mind squinting at small screens)
The fascination people have with putting Ogg/DOOM/eBooks on random objects amuses the hell out of me. I have a Vorbis player on my iPaq, and an eBook reader on my iPod, and never use either of them. As for porting games...oi. I recommend a GameBoy.
In response to the original poster, my camera's a MIPS, according to my firmware disassembly. Here's something I'm amazed nobody has mentioned:
My camera's firmware contains a TCP stack, PPP implementation, SMTP implementation, and dinky FTP server. It's pretty clear that the manufacturer intends (or intended) to release a modem of some sort. Yet, nobody seems to have mentioned network connectivity!