There is some factors into the price difference between new an used cars other then perception. A diamond, after, does not age, any defects are readily visible to a jeweler that knows what he is doing etc. A car has hundreds of different factors that affect it's condition and life. A new car is in a more or less known state ("lemons" that are defective from the factory aside). A used car, even if it is only just a few years old, has an unknown history. How well the car was maintained by the previous owner, any possible accidents that could have caused hidden damage, a long history of service problems, etc. There's a lack of information. What you do know, is the previous owner sold the car for a reason. That reason could be mundane, like they got a raise or new position and wanted a better car, they moved or can no longer afford it, or it could be because the car is a piece of shit and they are tired of it. Even a skilled mechanic cannot fully access the state of the car without a lot of expensive labor costs. Information has value, and there is more information about the new car then the used car, so that in part accounts for the difference in value when you drive it off the lot. There are of course other factors, a big one being the "cool" factor, the fact noone else's smelly butt has been in your drivers seat, warranties, etc.
In a world without copyright, all commercial software money would be made off support contracts. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it means the exact opposite of what you intend will happen in a lot of cases. Developers will clamp down as tight as they can on their source, protecting it as a trade secret. As long as they are the only ones with the source, they have a huge advantage in giving support. It is a hundred times easier to patch a bug, or add a requested feature, when you have the source. Currently you can make the source available if you so choose, without licensing it like the GPL. In fact, Microsoft does just that for Windows. If copyright ended today, do you think they would just shrug their shoulders and gpl everything? No, they would do everything in their power to consolidate as much knowledge of of Windows and it's source with them, so competitors can not quickly create their own windows distro (for lack of a better term) and claim a piece of the support contract pie.
Have you seen the average corporate america system? They are often running 1 gb max on Windows XP. Add in IT department mandated AV software, management software, business apps coded in a bizarre mixture of visual basic, java, and excel/word macros, auto updaters for 20 different apps, and Outlook or Lotus Notes. I've seen images where just the mandatory software that ran at boot had the workstations paging to disk. In that kind of environment, ram usage matters. 1 app being wasteful with ram is not a big deal, but when all the devs for all the apps you use decide to be lazy, it can be an issue. A web browser should not use excessive ram, and memory leaks are a problem in any app.
The special enclosure (that also supplies cooling) shields it to FCC standards I'm sure. It's not like one of the biggest computer hardware manufacturers doesn't know about FCC regulations.
Maybe if their problems were actually interesting, and not the side effect of them being idiots without a clue how networking works, people would be more interested. Everything I've seen seems to revolve around them digging up a method of connecting players from early rts games, used primarily on LAN environments, not actually testing anything with real world equipment. The problems they had are to be expected.
IIRC, the rules of mtg allow you to cut the opponents deck in any manner you choose (within reason of course) so long as you don't flip any cards over. The easy way to teach people to shuffle correctly is to cut their deck into 60 seperate piles, then start randomly putting them back. This method is also fun if they are playing without card sleaves, and their land is from an older edition. The older cards have a different coating and tend to have less vibrant colors, so you can easily pick them out and stack them all in one big clump.
As a long time mtg player, I can attest that almost every player complains about land distribution at one point or the other. The difference between a good player and a bad one is in building the deck with the right amounts of land, card draw, mana fixing, etc. to overcome all but the unluckiest of hands (I for example, once pulled 7 land cards in my hand of 7 in a deck that only had 15 out of 60 cards there were land, mulliganed to redraw with a 6 card hand, and drew 5 land. It happens (and yes I shuffled very well, as my playing group will reshuffle your deck for you if you do a halfassed job at it). But I, and everyone who was there, will remember that hand for a LONG time. The 10+ normal hands I got that night are already forgotten. Humans are terrible at determining randomness, and the sample any human is likely to see in his life from any given system is too small to properly calculate randomness with any accuracy. If a hundred thousand people are playing MTG:online, the chance of someone getting consistently bad hands is very high. That person will call the system broken of course, but the reality is if someone wasn't getting shafted, the system wouldn't be random.
Yeah, you sense partisanship, your own. The article didn't say or even imply the Clinton admin spirited away the data, fuck 1 tb drives didn't even exist in his administration. The article title is "Hard drive with Clinton-era data missing from National Archives". As in, a hard drive with Clinton era existed (ie they didnt destroy/lose the data before it was transferred to the archives) and now it is missing. The article clearly says "The drive was discovered missing in early April and the breach was immediately reported to senior officials at the NARA".
Furthermore it is being reported on by ComputerWorld, a site about tech news that doesn't exactly seem to have some grand political agenda (unless that agenda is to point out exactly how incompetent the IT staff at the National Archives is).
It's clear the partisan element here is you, and your thinking has become so clouded you are seeing conspiracies where there aren't any. We have a name for that, it is called paranoia. Paranoia seems to be behind a lot of the mistakes the Bush administration made, perhaps you should learn from their mistakes.
Data archives should be encrypted where possible, and data archives stored on external drives should always be encrypted. Furthermore, Social Security numbers of Clinton era staffers should have been purged in the first place, as there is no historical reason to save them and plenty of reason to delete them. This is a fuck-up by the National Archives, and they should be held accountable for their fuck-up. There is no reason to complicate the matter with politics.
It's not the "packet load" causing your problem. I've yet to see a router that can't handle enough packets to saturate any home internet connection you are likely to get. What causes the problem is the number of TCP connections. When bittorrent connects to a peer, it establishes a TCP connection. When your router does NAT (well technically PAT) it dynamically assigns outbound connections a port number. When the computer at the other end sends information as part of that established connection it sends the data to that port number. The router has to store a table of all TCP connections, the port number they are using, and the internal address to send the traffic too. Normal web traffic might at most create a few hundred of these connections. Bittorrent can create thousands. Furthermore, peers tend to just disappear rather then end cleanly, so the entry stays there until a timeout is reached to remove it. Most consumer routers have timeouts that are around 300-420 seconds long. If your router gives you the option (most shitty consumer models don't) you can lower it, to clear out dead connections faster and improve performance. The best option is normally to upgrade your router to one that has plenty of ram and can run an open build like dd-wrt, that lets you tweak the max number of connections and the timeout.
I think we all learned more from the mistakes we made then our successes anyways. There is value in failure too, as long as you recognize it. Some of the lessons I learned have served me well but are not taught in any book. For example, I learned the importance of humility to an engineer, when our sponsor's engineers overrule the objections of our machinist (who had over 50 years of experience in the field). It was a complete disaster, and when we reexamined the math we discovered the engineers had screwed it up royally, and the machinist's intuition was correct all along. I also learned a lot about how to NOT do project management (for example, splitting into seperate specialties such as software/electrical/mechanical without good communication and a clearly defined plan).
The goal of FIRST is not to teach you everything you need to know about robotics. It takes a lot more then you can learn after school and on weekends. Heck, you can spend 4+ years of college and still be a novice in the field. It's goal is to expose student's to science and engineering in an exciting way, and it accomplishes that.
I'm specifically speaking about the system from 6-7 years ago, when this patent was filed and hte system it describes. I was the student leader of our team and a driver at that time. Between the members of my team, the members of several teams we communicated with frequently throughout the build season (we shared designs for several basic components like motor mounts and drive trains etc. with other teams freely, and gave them advice on manufacturing them.) and all the other drivers and coaches I talked with while waiting for matches, and can't think of a single person who liked the rules as they were. You mentioned last year's rules, which, by the way, are greatly improved from the system used around 2003.
We won a regional competition, after being picked for the finals by a team whose robot had been unable to move for 75% of it's rounds. They were embarrassed to be there, because as they themselves frankly stated, they had no right to be there over the dozen teams left out of eliminations with superior robots.
When you have been part of the compeition as long as I have (I still volunteer as a ref every year since I graduated) you realize that even though it's a great program overall, FIRST often has it's head up it's ass.
As a former FIRST competitor, I can say that the consensus of 99% of the students HATED the retarded attempts at enforcing sportsmanship by silly tricks like the winner gets the losers score x3 in qualifying points. Combined with a completely broken randomization system (they tried to maximize the time teams had to recuperate between rounds, but the result was same handful of teams were in the random "pool" to pull from every round.) ensured the top seeded teams for the playoffs was practically random. It also made for what in my opinion was the most humiliating thing, where the winning team would have their opponent soundly beat, and would stop scoring for themselves and start scoring for their opponents. Any scoring and ranking system that makes College Football look fair and accurate is so flawed it should probably be patented and buried deep just so no one else can copy it.
Except you grant them permission to do whatever they hell you like by installing the OS. We are not talking about your standard EULA everyone ignores. You didn't purchase it, so you only have rights they choose to grant you. They aren't forcing you to install the Windows 7 release candidate, they aren't selling it to you, and they are telling you NOT to use it in any capacity where it might cause you to lose data or productivity. They are providing it so you can test your software and be ready to support it when it is released. If you don't like their terms, don't use it, you have 0 rights in this situation. If I write a program called shutdownin11months.exe and put it on a website with a note that running it will force a shutdown in 11 months, and you probably shouldn't use it, and you agree to the terms, download it, and run it, does that mean you can now sue me when your system shuts down? I told you what it does, what it will do, that you probably shouldn't do it, and how to stop it after you did it anyways, and I'm responsible?
Wait, so the OS initiating a shutdown (one of the OS's functions) after it passes a clearly defined date, in accordance with the licensing terms you agreed to on an OS you are getting for free to use for testing purposes is illegal? MS has been perfectly clear from the start what this release is for. They would be fully within their rights to have the os stop functioning completely after the date. The only way they would be responsible for damages is if it intentionally damaged the hardware in some way. Heck, if it accidentally destroys the hardware, they are still in the clear because they made it perfectly clear this was a no guarantees testing purposes build.
This is the ultimate non-story that makes the community look bad because it's pointless anti-ms rabble rousing instead of actual legitimate criticism.
So you want a network card that is essentially a mini computer within the computer, with it's own OS, processor, etc (which is what it would take to accomplish what you described). There are already firewall devices that attempt to do this for corporate networks, they don't work particularly well in reality. What happens when these devices become standardized and become the target of viruses themselves? Now you have a compromised device you can use to monitor and send network traffic with 0 indication on the pc itself. There is no magic ticket to computer security, and NOTHING will stop stupid users from willingly infecting themselves, short of replacing their computers with an etch-a-sketch.
Taxes on business is retarded. I know everyone wants to stick it to big business, but it makes no sense. When companies make money, the company either: is used to pay off expenses, including employees (who pay income tax) rent, etc (who pay property tax) or buying shit (and paying sales tax). Or they reinvest it (which hopefully leads to bigger income in the future) or they pay it out as some sort of dividend or stock buy (in which case those who benefit will be taxed with income/capital gains tax). Taxing the businesses profit amounts to double-dipping. The result of which is businesses now must compete with their competitors in not just the quality marketing, and price of their products, but also in how good they are at evading taxes. A company who manipulates its balance sheet to minimize tax liability has a competitive advantage against one who doesn't.
the result is ploys like being "headquartered" in a tax haven, and balance sheets that have been manipulated to hide as much information on their actual assets as possible. They further avoid taxes by buying influence over politicians to get tax rebates and incentives and other such bribes.
The result is, companies still manage to pay little to no taxes, the balance sheet manipulation makes accurate assessment of businesses impossible for investors and regulators, and competition is stifled because established businesses have the politicians bought and paid for, making sure any upstarts don't get the same rebates and preferential treatment they got.
The only people actually paying business taxes are small businesses, who cannot afford a team of lawyers, "creative" accountants, and massive campaign donations to minimize their tax liability. These are the exact same businesses who politicians claim to support.
Everyone knows when it comes to taxes the game is rigged. If a country cracks down on tax evasion there will be another one right behind it looking to claim all the jobs and economic stimulus that business creates. Obama's crackdown will probably lead to a net loss of tax revenue, and cost a lot of people their jobs.
It's already illegal. We don't need to run around making new laws. The problem is law enforcement world wide does not care. Even if the perpetrators of a major botnet are in their grasp, they will do their best to ignore it. If it happens on the internet, that means it's an international problem. Which means it's not their problem. They are too busy busting 19 year olds trying to sleep with 17 year olds, and "drug busts" of people licensed and permitted by their state government to grow marijuana, and harassing random people with the same name as a suspected "terrorist". Has anyone seen the FBI actually even investigate an identity theft case? We aren't talking criminal masterminds here, most of them could be tracked down with minimal effort.
The only solution to crap like this will have to be technical. I suspect for the internet to survive, enforcement will have to come at the ISP level. Automated detection of botnets and ddos attacks in progress is possible. What should happen is when it's detected you are infected, your upload is heavily throttled, and you are contacted to correct it. Failure to do so results in suspension of service. ISPs that don't implement it should face having all their packets dropped by everyone else. It won't stop the latest and greatest, but years old botnets could easily be stopped. The potential for false positives will suck, as will the temptation for ISP's to abuse it, but currently theres several botnets out there that could easily take down critical infrastructure if they decide to ddos it.
So MS should do a total rewrite of Windows? Oh yeah, theres no chance that would turn into a massive boondoggle, the software development version of a giant pit you shovel money into and never get anything out of.
While I agree theres definitely a ton of legacy crap to be thrown out, it works. While I'm sure the programmers will be happy, a total rewrite means throwing away a decade of lessons learned the hard way.
Apple had a lot of advantages in their situation that MS does not. For one thing, they controlled all the hardware. This meant no massive effort to get drivers made for an os that is still years away. The mac development community was much smaller, tighter knit, and connected with Apple then Window's has ever been. They supported it because Mac OS X would bring a lot of things missing in 9 that caused them a ton of headaches. There was very little in the way of custom in-house apps written for Mac, because there was very little corporate mac use period.
Finally, and perhaps the biggest, was the fact that for most users, their experience with the new OS would be on new hardware, at a time when hardware was improving at break neck speeds. There is a much bigger difference to the end user between a 200 mhz processor and a 400 mhz processor then a 2 ghz and 4 ghz.
The PC world and the Mac world are different. Apple firmly leads the Mac world. Microsoft is the big dog of the pc world but as Vista has shown, it has limits. Backwards compatibility is one of their biggest selling points. Windows works, its not alway pretty, but it works. Tossing out something that works to start over is the quick path to having nothing at all.
When the reality is you want to upgrade, but one stupid old app you use once a month is keeping you from doing it, it's a really good feature. Whether we like it or not, xp is going by the wayside. Already some newer hardware does not have xp drivers, and even more does not have vendor supported xp drivers. Not to mention, there really is some tech in Vista, and more coming in 7, to be excited about in a business enviroment. The problem until now for many enviroments has been the migration path has been taken from being a difficult task to a nigh-impossible task due to 1 or 2 legacy apps that have no replacement, and no active maintainers. This tool potentially makes the path just "difficult" again. Businesses still are not gonna run out and buy 7 upgrades for their existing machines, but as new machines come in something like this will make them a lot less hesitant.
You would think someone who makes an add-on designed to block sites from forcing annoying shit with java would realize how silly it is to fight with the people who make an addon to block annoying shit done with ads. Does noscript whitelist java ads on sites of others? After all, they need to eat too, right?
We all know the reality is if the no script dev quit today the add-on would live on with minimal interruption. Hell, the surprising thing is it is still being actively developed so hard, it already pretty much accomplishes exactly what it set out to do, and adding any new features will almost certainly be to it's detriment (and should probably be spun off into a new add-on). No-script was not the only java-script whitelisting add-on early on, the others probably quit because they felt it was a duplication of effort. Honestly in my opinion it's clearly time to fork it and get it out of the control of this jerk-off. Maybe then I won't have an incredibly minor update to install every morning.
As firefox grows this kind of thing will definitely increase. It's only a matter of time in my mind before people start trying to pass off malware in their plug-ins as updates. After all, when you are giving away something for free, and see the chance for some easy money, it's easy to be tempted. Here's hoping mozilla can revoke this guys ability to push updates. I like noscript, but I will be removing it from my work pc first thing Monday morning after seeing this, and my personal pc's as soon as I can find a decent replacement. He's crossed the line firmly into malware-author territory (deliberately interfering with another application/extension and overriding the user's express wishes without permission, while being deliberately deceptive about it.
It's really sad when a tool I use to give me greater control over my browsing experience becomes a lever to be used to hijack that same experience.
I have to agree. You think a car maker gives a crap about the cost of a repair job down the line? I know several engineers personally that work in the auto industry. Their priorities go something like this: 1. Meet bare minimum, required by law emissions, safety, and quality standards. 2. Be as cheap to make as possible 3. Be as cheap to assemble as possible 4. Require the minimum retooling for factories making it. 5. Require minimum retraining for workers assembling it. 6. When it fails (and it will) make sure it doesn't make the car catch on fire, or slam on the gas, or lose the ability to brake, or otherwise hurt/maim/kill the driver (lawsuits cost money). 7. Make it implement some sort buzzword marketing tech that doesn't do much but sells cars. 8. Make it implement some tech that actually improves the car in a way that sells more cars. 9. Make it look cool. 10. Be durable enough to last past the warranty in 99% of vehicles, and not blatantly defective enough to force a recall/inspire a class action lawsuit. 11. Be servicable.
Notice thats a long list of conflicting goals, and how easy it is to service is on the bottom. Few people even look at the (estimated) total cost of ownership of a car, much less personally inspect how easy it looks to surface. And since systemic, hard to service problems tend to show up 5 years down the line, when the engineers responsible have long ago moved on to other projects, and that particular model has already been replaced anyways, noone really cares.
The idea that some sort of sneaky conspiracy of planned obsolescence is going on is bogus. The reality is the engineers and designers have different priorities. Replacement parts are often expensive because the machines required to make them are expensive, and they want to retool them to make something else as soon as possible, so they often make a bunch of extras and shove them in a warehouse somewhere. If those run out, and they have to make more, it means they have to spend a ton of money to make another run of them.
When people are buying cars, they want the latest and greatest. A car made using the tried and tested tech from 10 years ago would last longer, and be more reliable, but would offer less performance,comfort, and safety for pretty much the same price or more.
What about when companies merge, or otherwise have to connect networks? Two companies using 10.x could have overlapping IPs.
Holy shit, so the network admins will have to do their jobs? It's not like just patching two completely different networks together makes a whole lot of sense anyways.
Enjoy having your entire server room confiscated in a raid for "forensics". If you are very lucky, and hire some very expensive lawyers, you will have your equipment back in 2 to 3 years.
That's because making a living off Window's security deficiencies is for all intents and purpose the same thing as making a living off Computer security deficiencies. Sure, there are aspects of the Windows security model that downright suck. But the reality is every system has security vulnerabilities out the ass. Whether Windows or Linux or BSD or what have you has more is up for debate, but the definite thing is that security is an active, evolving process, and whatever OS is used by the majority of the world is going to be under constant attack.
I suppose if builders didn't build houses so damn easy to get into, we wouldn't need locks (and thus lock makers), and alarms, and cops and security guards, and fences, and a neighborhood watch. After all, the home builder made the house, he should guarantee it in perpetuity as an impenetrable fortress. Even if the owner ignores his recommendations, and leaves the doors unlocked and the windows open, it should still be secure. And despite the need for security, it must still be convenient for the owner and guests to enter and exit at will, pleasant to look at, and maintainable by an owner who has no knowledge of experience in houses.
You act as if security is easy, and MS could accomplish it if only it tried a little harder. That's not the reality. MS deserves flack for any number of legitimate grievances. They took way to long to take security seriously (basically the entire time from XP's release to Vista was spent making massive security improvements to catch up to where they should have been), they use abusive business practices to encourage lock-in. They make bizarre and frankly retarded attempts at anti-piracy like activation/genuine advantage (if there ever was a drm measure that does nothing to even slow pirates down, and annoys the crap out of legit purchasers, its Windows Activation).
But acting like MS and MS alone must bear the burden for ensuring the security of pc's, is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
There is some factors into the price difference between new an used cars other then perception. A diamond, after, does not age, any defects are readily visible to a jeweler that knows what he is doing etc. A car has hundreds of different factors that affect it's condition and life. A new car is in a more or less known state ("lemons" that are defective from the factory aside). A used car, even if it is only just a few years old, has an unknown history. How well the car was maintained by the previous owner, any possible accidents that could have caused hidden damage, a long history of service problems, etc. There's a lack of information. What you do know, is the previous owner sold the car for a reason. That reason could be mundane, like they got a raise or new position and wanted a better car, they moved or can no longer afford it, or it could be because the car is a piece of shit and they are tired of it. Even a skilled mechanic cannot fully access the state of the car without a lot of expensive labor costs. Information has value, and there is more information about the new car then the used car, so that in part accounts for the difference in value when you drive it off the lot. There are of course other factors, a big one being the "cool" factor, the fact noone else's smelly butt has been in your drivers seat, warranties, etc.
In a world without copyright, all commercial software money would be made off support contracts. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it means the exact opposite of what you intend will happen in a lot of cases. Developers will clamp down as tight as they can on their source, protecting it as a trade secret. As long as they are the only ones with the source, they have a huge advantage in giving support. It is a hundred times easier to patch a bug, or add a requested feature, when you have the source. Currently you can make the source available if you so choose, without licensing it like the GPL. In fact, Microsoft does just that for Windows. If copyright ended today, do you think they would just shrug their shoulders and gpl everything? No, they would do everything in their power to consolidate as much knowledge of of Windows and it's source with them, so competitors can not quickly create their own windows distro (for lack of a better term) and claim a piece of the support contract pie.
Have you seen the average corporate america system? They are often running 1 gb max on Windows XP. Add in IT department mandated AV software, management software, business apps coded in a bizarre mixture of visual basic, java, and excel/word macros, auto updaters for 20 different apps, and Outlook or Lotus Notes. I've seen images where just the mandatory software that ran at boot had the workstations paging to disk. In that kind of environment, ram usage matters. 1 app being wasteful with ram is not a big deal, but when all the devs for all the apps you use decide to be lazy, it can be an issue. A web browser should not use excessive ram, and memory leaks are a problem in any app.
The special enclosure (that also supplies cooling) shields it to FCC standards I'm sure. It's not like one of the biggest computer hardware manufacturers doesn't know about FCC regulations.
Maybe if their problems were actually interesting, and not the side effect of them being idiots without a clue how networking works, people would be more interested. Everything I've seen seems to revolve around them digging up a method of connecting players from early rts games, used primarily on LAN environments, not actually testing anything with real world equipment. The problems they had are to be expected.
IIRC, the rules of mtg allow you to cut the opponents deck in any manner you choose (within reason of course) so long as you don't flip any cards over. The easy way to teach people to shuffle correctly is to cut their deck into 60 seperate piles, then start randomly putting them back. This method is also fun if they are playing without card sleaves, and their land is from an older edition. The older cards have a different coating and tend to have less vibrant colors, so you can easily pick them out and stack them all in one big clump.
As a long time mtg player, I can attest that almost every player complains about land distribution at one point or the other. The difference between a good player and a bad one is in building the deck with the right amounts of land, card draw, mana fixing, etc. to overcome all but the unluckiest of hands (I for example, once pulled 7 land cards in my hand of 7 in a deck that only had 15 out of 60 cards there were land, mulliganed to redraw with a 6 card hand, and drew 5 land. It happens (and yes I shuffled very well, as my playing group will reshuffle your deck for you if you do a halfassed job at it). But I, and everyone who was there, will remember that hand for a LONG time. The 10+ normal hands I got that night are already forgotten. Humans are terrible at determining randomness, and the sample any human is likely to see in his life from any given system is too small to properly calculate randomness with any accuracy. If a hundred thousand people are playing MTG:online, the chance of someone getting consistently bad hands is very high. That person will call the system broken of course, but the reality is if someone wasn't getting shafted, the system wouldn't be random.
Yeah, you sense partisanship, your own. The article didn't say or even imply the Clinton admin spirited away the data, fuck 1 tb drives didn't even exist in his administration. The article title is "Hard drive with Clinton-era data missing from National Archives". As in, a hard drive with Clinton era existed (ie they didnt destroy/lose the data before it was transferred to the archives) and now it is missing. The article clearly says "The drive was discovered missing in early April and the breach was immediately reported to senior officials at the NARA".
Furthermore it is being reported on by ComputerWorld, a site about tech news that doesn't exactly seem to have some grand political agenda (unless that agenda is to point out exactly how incompetent the IT staff at the National Archives is).
It's clear the partisan element here is you, and your thinking has become so clouded you are seeing conspiracies where there aren't any. We have a name for that, it is called paranoia. Paranoia seems to be behind a lot of the mistakes the Bush administration made, perhaps you should learn from their mistakes.
Data archives should be encrypted where possible, and data archives stored on external drives should always be encrypted. Furthermore, Social Security numbers of Clinton era staffers should have been purged in the first place, as there is no historical reason to save them and plenty of reason to delete them. This is a fuck-up by the National Archives, and they should be held accountable for their fuck-up. There is no reason to complicate the matter with politics.
It's not the "packet load" causing your problem. I've yet to see a router that can't handle enough packets to saturate any home internet connection you are likely to get. What causes the problem is the number of TCP connections. When bittorrent connects to a peer, it establishes a TCP connection. When your router does NAT (well technically PAT) it dynamically assigns outbound connections a port number. When the computer at the other end sends information as part of that established connection it sends the data to that port number. The router has to store a table of all TCP connections, the port number they are using, and the internal address to send the traffic too. Normal web traffic might at most create a few hundred of these connections. Bittorrent can create thousands. Furthermore, peers tend to just disappear rather then end cleanly, so the entry stays there until a timeout is reached to remove it. Most consumer routers have timeouts that are around 300-420 seconds long. If your router gives you the option (most shitty consumer models don't) you can lower it, to clear out dead connections faster and improve performance. The best option is normally to upgrade your router to one that has plenty of ram and can run an open build like dd-wrt, that lets you tweak the max number of connections and the timeout.
In case you haven't figured it out, Gabe hates consoles. TF2 on xbox was just a cheap cash grab to fund further pc development.
I think we all learned more from the mistakes we made then our successes anyways. There is value in failure too, as long as you recognize it. Some of the lessons I learned have served me well but are not taught in any book. For example, I learned the importance of humility to an engineer, when our sponsor's engineers overrule the objections of our machinist (who had over 50 years of experience in the field). It was a complete disaster, and when we reexamined the math we discovered the engineers had screwed it up royally, and the machinist's intuition was correct all along. I also learned a lot about how to NOT do project management (for example, splitting into seperate specialties such as software/electrical/mechanical without good communication and a clearly defined plan).
The goal of FIRST is not to teach you everything you need to know about robotics. It takes a lot more then you can learn after school and on weekends. Heck, you can spend 4+ years of college and still be a novice in the field. It's goal is to expose student's to science and engineering in an exciting way, and it accomplishes that.
I'm specifically speaking about the system from 6-7 years ago, when this patent was filed and hte system it describes. I was the student leader of our team and a driver at that time. Between the members of my team, the members of several teams we communicated with frequently throughout the build season (we shared designs for several basic components like motor mounts and drive trains etc. with other teams freely, and gave them advice on manufacturing them.) and all the other drivers and coaches I talked with while waiting for matches, and can't think of a single person who liked the rules as they were. You mentioned last year's rules, which, by the way, are greatly improved from the system used around 2003.
We won a regional competition, after being picked for the finals by a team whose robot had been unable to move for 75% of it's rounds. They were embarrassed to be there, because as they themselves frankly stated, they had no right to be there over the dozen teams left out of eliminations with superior robots.
When you have been part of the compeition as long as I have (I still volunteer as a ref every year since I graduated) you realize that even though it's a great program overall, FIRST often has it's head up it's ass.
As a former FIRST competitor, I can say that the consensus of 99% of the students HATED the retarded attempts at enforcing sportsmanship by silly tricks like the winner gets the losers score x3 in qualifying points. Combined with a completely broken randomization system (they tried to maximize the time teams had to recuperate between rounds, but the result was same handful of teams were in the random "pool" to pull from every round.) ensured the top seeded teams for the playoffs was practically random. It also made for what in my opinion was the most humiliating thing, where the winning team would have their opponent soundly beat, and would stop scoring for themselves and start scoring for their opponents. Any scoring and ranking system that makes College Football look fair and accurate is so flawed it should probably be patented and buried deep just so no one else can copy it.
Except you grant them permission to do whatever they hell you like by installing the OS. We are not talking about your standard EULA everyone ignores. You didn't purchase it, so you only have rights they choose to grant you. They aren't forcing you to install the Windows 7 release candidate, they aren't selling it to you, and they are telling you NOT to use it in any capacity where it might cause you to lose data or productivity. They are providing it so you can test your software and be ready to support it when it is released. If you don't like their terms, don't use it, you have 0 rights in this situation. If I write a program called shutdownin11months.exe and put it on a website with a note that running it will force a shutdown in 11 months, and you probably shouldn't use it, and you agree to the terms, download it, and run it, does that mean you can now sue me when your system shuts down? I told you what it does, what it will do, that you probably shouldn't do it, and how to stop it after you did it anyways, and I'm responsible?
Wait, so the OS initiating a shutdown (one of the OS's functions) after it passes a clearly defined date, in accordance with the licensing terms you agreed to on an OS you are getting for free to use for testing purposes is illegal? MS has been perfectly clear from the start what this release is for. They would be fully within their rights to have the os stop functioning completely after the date. The only way they would be responsible for damages is if it intentionally damaged the hardware in some way. Heck, if it accidentally destroys the hardware, they are still in the clear because they made it perfectly clear this was a no guarantees testing purposes build.
This is the ultimate non-story that makes the community look bad because it's pointless anti-ms rabble rousing instead of actual legitimate criticism.
So you want a network card that is essentially a mini computer within the computer, with it's own OS, processor, etc (which is what it would take to accomplish what you described). There are already firewall devices that attempt to do this for corporate networks, they don't work particularly well in reality. What happens when these devices become standardized and become the target of viruses themselves? Now you have a compromised device you can use to monitor and send network traffic with 0 indication on the pc itself. There is no magic ticket to computer security, and NOTHING will stop stupid users from willingly infecting themselves, short of replacing their computers with an etch-a-sketch.
Taxes on business is retarded. I know everyone wants to stick it to big business, but it makes no sense. When companies make money, the company either: is used to pay off expenses, including employees (who pay income tax) rent, etc (who pay property tax) or buying shit (and paying sales tax). Or they reinvest it (which hopefully leads to bigger income in the future) or they pay it out as some sort of dividend or stock buy (in which case those who benefit will be taxed with income/capital gains tax). Taxing the businesses profit amounts to double-dipping. The result of which is businesses now must compete with their competitors in not just the quality marketing, and price of their products, but also in how good they are at evading taxes. A company who manipulates its balance sheet to minimize tax liability has a competitive advantage against one who doesn't.
the result is ploys like being "headquartered" in a tax haven, and balance sheets that have been manipulated to hide as much information on their actual assets as possible. They further avoid taxes by buying influence over politicians to get tax rebates and incentives and other such bribes.
The result is, companies still manage to pay little to no taxes, the balance sheet manipulation makes accurate assessment of businesses impossible for investors and regulators, and competition is stifled because established businesses have the politicians bought and paid for, making sure any upstarts don't get the same rebates and preferential treatment they got.
The only people actually paying business taxes are small businesses, who cannot afford a team of lawyers, "creative" accountants, and massive campaign donations to minimize their tax liability. These are the exact same businesses who politicians claim to support.
Everyone knows when it comes to taxes the game is rigged. If a country cracks down on tax evasion there will be another one right behind it looking to claim all the jobs and economic stimulus that business creates. Obama's crackdown will probably lead to a net loss of tax revenue, and cost a lot of people their jobs.
It's already illegal. We don't need to run around making new laws. The problem is law enforcement world wide does not care. Even if the perpetrators of a major botnet are in their grasp, they will do their best to ignore it. If it happens on the internet, that means it's an international problem. Which means it's not their problem. They are too busy busting 19 year olds trying to sleep with 17 year olds, and "drug busts" of people licensed and permitted by their state government to grow marijuana, and harassing random people with the same name as a suspected "terrorist". Has anyone seen the FBI actually even investigate an identity theft case? We aren't talking criminal masterminds here, most of them could be tracked down with minimal effort.
The only solution to crap like this will have to be technical. I suspect for the internet to survive, enforcement will have to come at the ISP level. Automated detection of botnets and ddos attacks in progress is possible. What should happen is when it's detected you are infected, your upload is heavily throttled, and you are contacted to correct it. Failure to do so results in suspension of service. ISPs that don't implement it should face having all their packets dropped by everyone else. It won't stop the latest and greatest, but years old botnets could easily be stopped. The potential for false positives will suck, as will the temptation for ISP's to abuse it, but currently theres several botnets out there that could easily take down critical infrastructure if they decide to ddos it.
So MS should do a total rewrite of Windows? Oh yeah, theres no chance that would turn into a massive boondoggle, the software development version of a giant pit you shovel money into and never get anything out of.
While I agree theres definitely a ton of legacy crap to be thrown out, it works. While I'm sure the programmers will be happy, a total rewrite means throwing away a decade of lessons learned the hard way.
Apple had a lot of advantages in their situation that MS does not. For one thing, they controlled all the hardware. This meant no massive effort to get drivers made for an os that is still years away.
The mac development community was much smaller, tighter knit, and connected with Apple then Window's has ever been. They supported it because Mac OS X would bring a lot of things missing in 9 that caused them a ton of headaches. There was very little in the way of custom in-house apps written for Mac, because there was very little corporate mac use period.
Finally, and perhaps the biggest, was the fact that for most users, their experience with the new OS would be on new hardware, at a time when hardware was improving at break neck speeds. There is a much bigger difference to the end user between a 200 mhz processor and a 400 mhz processor then a 2 ghz and 4 ghz.
The PC world and the Mac world are different. Apple firmly leads the Mac world. Microsoft is the big dog of the pc world but as Vista has shown, it has limits. Backwards compatibility is one of their biggest selling points. Windows works, its not alway pretty, but it works. Tossing out something that works to start over is the quick path to having nothing at all.
When the reality is you want to upgrade, but one stupid old app you use once a month is keeping you from doing it, it's a really good feature. Whether we like it or not, xp is going by the wayside. Already some newer hardware does not have xp drivers, and even more does not have vendor supported xp drivers. Not to mention, there really is some tech in Vista, and more coming in 7, to be excited about in a business enviroment. The problem until now for many enviroments has been the migration path has been taken from being a difficult task to a nigh-impossible task due to 1 or 2 legacy apps that have no replacement, and no active maintainers. This tool potentially makes the path just "difficult" again. Businesses still are not gonna run out and buy 7 upgrades for their existing machines, but as new machines come in something like this will make them a lot less hesitant.
You would think someone who makes an add-on designed to block sites from forcing annoying shit with java would realize how silly it is to fight with the people who make an addon to block annoying shit done with ads. Does noscript whitelist java ads on sites of others? After all, they need to eat too, right?
We all know the reality is if the no script dev quit today the add-on would live on with minimal interruption. Hell, the surprising thing is it is still being actively developed so hard, it already pretty much accomplishes exactly what it set out to do, and adding any new features will almost certainly be to it's detriment (and should probably be spun off into a new add-on). No-script was not the only java-script whitelisting add-on early on, the others probably quit because they felt it was a duplication of effort. Honestly in my opinion it's clearly time to fork it and get it out of the control of this jerk-off. Maybe then I won't have an incredibly minor update to install every morning.
As firefox grows this kind of thing will definitely increase. It's only a matter of time in my mind before people start trying to pass off malware in their plug-ins as updates. After all, when you are giving away something for free, and see the chance for some easy money, it's easy to be tempted. Here's hoping mozilla can revoke this guys ability to push updates. I like noscript, but I will be removing it from my work pc first thing Monday morning after seeing this, and my personal pc's as soon as I can find a decent replacement. He's crossed the line firmly into malware-author territory (deliberately interfering with another application/extension and overriding the user's express wishes without permission, while being deliberately deceptive about it.
It's really sad when a tool I use to give me greater control over my browsing experience becomes a lever to be used to hijack that same experience.
I have to agree. You think a car maker gives a crap about the cost of a repair job down the line? I know several engineers personally that work in the auto industry. Their priorities go something like this:
1. Meet bare minimum, required by law emissions, safety, and quality standards.
2. Be as cheap to make as possible
3. Be as cheap to assemble as possible
4. Require the minimum retooling for factories making it.
5. Require minimum retraining for workers assembling it.
6. When it fails (and it will) make sure it doesn't make the car catch on fire, or slam on the gas, or lose the ability to brake, or otherwise hurt/maim/kill the driver (lawsuits cost money).
7. Make it implement some sort buzzword marketing tech that doesn't do much but sells cars.
8. Make it implement some tech that actually improves the car in a way that sells more cars.
9. Make it look cool.
10. Be durable enough to last past the warranty in 99% of vehicles, and not blatantly defective enough to force a recall/inspire a class action lawsuit.
11. Be servicable.
Notice thats a long list of conflicting goals, and how easy it is to service is on the bottom. Few people even look at the (estimated) total cost of ownership of a car, much less personally inspect how easy it looks to surface. And since systemic, hard to service problems tend to show up 5 years down the line, when the engineers responsible have long ago moved on to other projects, and that particular model has already been replaced anyways, noone really cares.
The idea that some sort of sneaky conspiracy of planned obsolescence is going on is bogus. The reality is the engineers and designers have different priorities. Replacement parts are often expensive because the machines required to make them are expensive, and they want to retool them to make something else as soon as possible, so they often make a bunch of extras and shove them in a warehouse somewhere. If those run out, and they have to make more, it means they have to spend a ton of money to make another run of them.
When people are buying cars, they want the latest and greatest. A car made using the tried and tested tech from 10 years ago would last longer, and be more reliable, but would offer less performance,comfort, and safety for pretty much the same price or more.
What about when companies merge, or otherwise have to connect networks? Two companies using 10.x could have overlapping IPs.
Holy shit, so the network admins will have to do their jobs? It's not like just patching two completely different networks together makes a whole lot of sense anyways.
Enjoy having your entire server room confiscated in a raid for "forensics". If you are very lucky, and hire some very expensive lawyers, you will have your equipment back in 2 to 3 years.
That's because making a living off Window's security deficiencies is for all intents and purpose the same thing as making a living off Computer security deficiencies. Sure, there are aspects of the Windows security model that downright suck. But the reality is every system has security vulnerabilities out the ass. Whether Windows or Linux or BSD or what have you has more is up for debate, but the definite thing is that security is an active, evolving process, and whatever OS is used by the majority of the world is going to be under constant attack.
I suppose if builders didn't build houses so damn easy to get into, we wouldn't need locks (and thus lock makers), and alarms, and cops and security guards, and fences, and a neighborhood watch. After all, the home builder made the house, he should guarantee it in perpetuity as an impenetrable fortress. Even if the owner ignores his recommendations, and leaves the doors unlocked and the windows open, it should still be secure. And despite the need for security, it must still be convenient for the owner and guests to enter and exit at will, pleasant to look at, and maintainable by an owner who has no knowledge of experience in houses.
You act as if security is easy, and MS could accomplish it if only it tried a little harder. That's not the reality. MS deserves flack for any number of legitimate grievances. They took way to long to take security seriously (basically the entire time from XP's release to Vista was spent making massive security improvements to catch up to where they should have been), they use abusive business practices to encourage lock-in. They make bizarre and frankly retarded attempts at anti-piracy like activation/genuine advantage (if there ever was a drm measure that does nothing to even slow pirates down, and annoys the crap out of legit purchasers, its Windows Activation).
But acting like MS and MS alone must bear the burden for ensuring the security of pc's, is ridiculous.