The ETag feature is supposed to help caching. That's why it was implemented. It's a unique ID associated with a particular version of a page, the browser sends a code saying "Send me X if the current version isn't $ETag, a copy of which I already have", and the server responds either to say the browser has an up-to-date version or sends the updated version.
Why not use timestamps or something like that, I pretend you ask? Well, because that's a less reliable method, as we've learned over many decades of trying to get that to work. Plus, I hate to mention it, but you can probably profile a user based upon a collection of timestamps if you try...
The network traffic saved is that saved by not sending new copies of every single image and static HTML page every time the user navigates around a website and sees common content. With today's image-heavy web design, I'd estimate it's at least 100k (this/comments.pl I'm-using-to-write-a-reply-to-you Slashdot page alone has over 200k of images, yet is only 11k of HTML), and up to a megabyte, per page, probably constituting more than 90% per click, averaged over pages you've been to, pages you haven't but that are part of a website you've already navigated some of, and pages on websites you've navigating for the first time.
So yeah, it's quite a substantial amount of bandwidth being saved.
Another example would be Kodak who leapt on digital photography very early on, and haven't really been able to reap the rewards, due in part to the fact technologies they pioneered ended up being sold as part of more universal widgets (like cameraphones.)
I think the "Firewire already does it", "PS/2 already does it", "Ethernet already does it" people for the most part unintentionally explain why USB was invented - and why the standard is so apparently ugly.
The point of USB is to be universal, to allow everything to be plugged into a single port. Ethernet wouldn't work for 90% of USB applications because (a) it's kinda bad for things like keyboards with buttons on them to power up the computer, (b) while power over Ethernet is kinda standardized, it's not terribly flexible or useful.
Is it beautiful? Hell no. USB has bits of every standard grafted onto it to make it work. But the thing is it works. It's a "Just works" technology, and that's why it existed. If we'd tried to use Ethernet for all of this, we'd still be hooking keyboards up to PS/2 ports and mobile devices would need a collection of cables and plugs when they're "docked".
The NSA is currently, reportedly, collecting the meta data of every phone call made through the US. It's all simple source/destination/time/duration information, and they collect it regardless of whether the originating phone is owned by Glenn Greenwald or your mother.
(I'm assuming your mother is not a major whistleblower or some other dangerous subversive the government feels the need to keep tabs on.)
So why wouldn't they collect similar metadata from every airline and other transportation concern in the country about every single trip anyone makes that has a termination or origination or both point within the US? There's going to be less data to store than the phone metadata thing, and it's going to be just as useful.
If only there was a single XKCD cartoon that exposed the folly of assuming encryption is an adequate safeguard against totalitarian government thugs who have the power to physically or psychologically torture people.
Ah but there probably isn't so El Reg must be right...
They don't generally follow the rules here, with "Troll" and "Overrated" frequently used for (-1, Disagree); why would they on the Huffington Post, which is arguably even more partisan?
I'm sorry, but with the conviction and imprisonment of Bradley Manning today, there just aren't any cells left. Regrettably, this also means the US government is unable to prosecute torturers, war criminals, bankers who were responsible for the 2007 economic meltdown, or Dane Cook.
Until the government explicitly unbans living efficiently, complaining reform needs to be bottom up is absurd.
I don't drive an SUV, I drive a little Toyota, but I'd rather walk, or use quality public transportation. Unfortunately state and local governments have been exercising a war on walking since the early 1950s, implementing extremist pro-car zoning codes that force businesses to be built far away from the people they serve, and with large spaces between them so they can't be clustered.
There's no evidence that Americans have ever, as a group, wanted to be forced to drive everywhere - they've wanted the option to drive, but nobody outside of a small extreme group actually wants to be forced to drive first thing every morning, or after a hard day's work, or to and from a shop to get a gallon of milk. But with cities deliberately run down until relatively recently, and pro-car nutcases controlling the building of all new developments, that's been the effect.
Reportedly Linus Torvalds is hopping mad because five minutes after this game was stolen, someone downloaded the complete source code to the Linux kernel!
You don't have to solve world hunger to get into space. You do have to solve those kinds of problems if people are going to "live forever" (as in, not die of old age), with the resultant population boom that would result.
The only science that's been found to be behind it is that people are slightly less likely to lie if they think that a lie detector will call them out on it.
Monitoring breathing, et al, doesn't mean it is capable of detecting lies. Me saying "molecules", "atoms", and "memory" doesn't make homeopathy have a science between it either...
The more I've read about the proposal the more I think Musk is being deliberately deceitful and disingenuous, so "Elon Musk claims"... should be interpreted in a different light.
Just a recap:
1. The proposed hyperloop doesn't serve all of the cities that the HSR proposal does.
2. The proposed hyperloop requires an hour of transportation or more at both ends because it doesn't terminate anywhere near SF or LA. Meaning travel by Hyperloop will take longer than HSR in most cases.
3. The proposed hyperloop is supposedly a viaduct that can be built for $5M/mile. Either it is, in which case that's one cheap viaduct, and also a way HSR could be built more cheaply, or it isn't and it'll cost ten times that, like normal viaducts do.
4. The proposal makes outrageous and ridiculous claims about the energy efficiency of HSR, estimating it at being around 3x real world HSR systems use.
5. The "cheap" version of the Hyperloop will be cramped, like air travel.
It's usual for opponents of transit systems to pretend to be pro-transit and then um and ah about the costs, whittling down the proposal to something that nobody wants, "Oh, we know light rail would be popular and is exactly what this town needs, but, well, it's just very expensive, and a Bus Rapid Transit system would at least do most of what light rail is for, but at a fraction of the cost", and they make these arguments and finally the pro-transit people give in, recognizing that the fake proposal is better than nothing: and then it's put to the voters who vote against because it's a FUCKING BUS.
And here we have the same on a larger scale. In five years Elon Musk is proposing to build a giant viaduct at a fraction of the cost of any viaduct known to man using technologies that have never been used that doesn't go anywhere instead of that big expensive rail system everyone wants.
He's not trying to introduce a revolutionary new form of transport. He's trying to kill a legitimate rail project.
And if he said "Listen, I think HSR is too expensive, we should concentrate on improving our airports and roadways" I'd at least have some respect for him. But he's lying, he's telling lies to try to get the result he wants. What a slimeball.
The analogy would be even better if his predecessor was always running around peeking into people's windows, starting fights, and stealing people's diaries, and then Obama came along and said "This has to stop. I promise to change all this", and then when he gets into office he runs around peeking into people's windows, starts fights, steals people's diaries, and photocopies Michelle's diary and keeps a locked copy of it in his drawer, just, y'know, as a bonus eff-ewe.
While that's true, even "standard" networks aren't that similar. For example, T-Mobile USA is a completely open network that uses SIM cards and industry standard protocols. Unfortunately though, their spectrum allocations aren't similar to those of most carriers which means that this phone would be EDGE only in most of the country if used on T-Mobile.
It's the scanner bit. Basically it applies a heavy amount of compression to the final result by looking for blocks that match and duplicating them. Which is all fine until the copier sees what it thinks is a 0 but is actually an 8.
I think many people use the Troll option when they see "Clearly false". I'm familiar enough with Climategate to know that many on the right believes this nonsense, but nonsense it is.
Most of DNS at this point is too insecure for this to be a workable solution. What do I mean by that? Well, in theory a system called DNSSEC exists that's supposed to ensure you can guarantee a response from any DNS server is correct, that it hasn't been compromized by a MITM attack.
In practice, it requires involvement from numerous different organizations from the registrars to the DNS hosters, and most simply don't support DNSSEC at all.
FWIW it's also probably overloading the DNS system to incorporate this kind of functionality. In theory LDAP has existed for decades and ought to be perfectly capable of providing information that would allow a bog standard email client to get every bit of information needed to send an email to a [person] @ [domain], right down to forwarding that email to a different domain if need be. In practice... few people understand it, few people are willing to standardize on something they don't understand and add the standards needed to make it work, and so email continues to be an unholy clusterfood.
Honestly I've never heard the word "just" used that way. I can see it being used to imply that the work to be done is simple, "Oh it's easy to get to Kansas, just click your heels three times", but not that you pick a fraudulant way to appear to achieve what follows the word in order to save yourself time.
I agree the term "make up" is ambiguous but I don't think the "just" should be considered a qualifier here. I'd personally lean towards assuming the experiment is legit unless there's other good reasons to believe otherwise, given the language differences. If it's false, there's little chance the authors will not be found out in time, if only because scientists following the same research may for now make asssumptions that will be hopelessly wrong.
For reasons most of us don't understand (myself included) the Chromebook is apparently selling like hot cakes, with some manufacturers finding they sell more Chromebooks than all their Windows laptops put together.
And if you think that doesn't make sense, you're in good company, but you only have to look at sales of a device of an even more crippled laptop*, one that doesn't even have a keyboard and requires use only of applications (themselves even more stripped down than normal) that the manufacturer approves of, that costs more than many regular, full sized, full spec'd, laptops, to understand that the market doesn't always produce winners that nerds like you and me see as obvious.
* Four letters, first is lowercase. Rhymes with "Sad".
The fact we live in a modern economy where money changes hands electronically, with logs at the transaction level, shouldn't blind us to the fact that we haven't always lived like that, and taxes - income and sales - existed back when 99% of transactions took place by anonymously exchanging green pieces of paper.
If I buy a car in bitcoins, the car dealership is going to report a loss of one car in exchange for something and I'm going to report I bought one. Either our descriptions of the transactions will match, or we'll find ourselves audited.
War on ___? Bollocks. There's no need. There wasn't one forty years ago when few transactions involved credit cards, why would there be one one?
OK, to clarify, are we talking about the same technology used for, say, SD Cards? And if so, is there a serious risk that an SD card left in a box or on a shelf for an extended (say, half a decade) period of time will actually lose some or all of its contents?
Genuinely: what's this about regular old Flash being unable to store data for more than a year or three? Have I seriously misunderstood or is this a real problem I've been extremely lucky to avoid thus far?
Funny, I was kinda taught the opposite, that Pterodactyls were "flying Dinosaurs" but "completely unrelated to Birds" who were "entirely different" from Dinosaurs.
Turned out that a combination of my teachers not actually being that on-it, and the movement of science over the last 30-35 years, has meant I've had to relearn a lot of stuff that's turned out to be completely opposite to what I was taught.
Birds? Those are direct descendents of dinosaurs. Some even consider them "living" dinosaurs. There were even, according to the fossil evidence, dinos with feathers, which may even have been the majority - they didn't look like Rhinos/Hippos/Elephants, which makes sense given those are completely unrelated. If Jurassic Park were remade today, the CGI would be completely different.
It's been possible for a long time. There's an optional GMail extension that puts a number (number of unread emails, obviously) on the favicon that's continually updated, I have it installed for obvious reasons.
Unnecessary animated favicons I suspect would be so pointless that any website that used them would soon suffer a boycott, so I don't see that happening.
Slashdot Mirror
The ETag feature is supposed to help caching. That's why it was implemented. It's a unique ID associated with a particular version of a page, the browser sends a code saying "Send me X if the current version isn't $ETag, a copy of which I already have", and the server responds either to say the browser has an up-to-date version or sends the updated version.
Why not use timestamps or something like that, I pretend you ask? Well, because that's a less reliable method, as we've learned over many decades of trying to get that to work. Plus, I hate to mention it, but you can probably profile a user based upon a collection of timestamps if you try...
The network traffic saved is that saved by not sending new copies of every single image and static HTML page every time the user navigates around a website and sees common content. With today's image-heavy web design, I'd estimate it's at least 100k (this /comments.pl I'm-using-to-write-a-reply-to-you Slashdot page alone has over 200k of images, yet is only 11k of HTML), and up to a megabyte, per page, probably constituting more than 90% per click, averaged over pages you've been to, pages you haven't but that are part of a website you've already navigated some of, and pages on websites you've navigating for the first time.
So yeah, it's quite a substantial amount of bandwidth being saved.
Another example would be Kodak who leapt on digital photography very early on, and haven't really been able to reap the rewards, due in part to the fact technologies they pioneered ended up being sold as part of more universal widgets (like cameraphones.)
I think the "Firewire already does it", "PS/2 already does it", "Ethernet already does it" people for the most part unintentionally explain why USB was invented - and why the standard is so apparently ugly.
The point of USB is to be universal, to allow everything to be plugged into a single port. Ethernet wouldn't work for 90% of USB applications because (a) it's kinda bad for things like keyboards with buttons on them to power up the computer, (b) while power over Ethernet is kinda standardized, it's not terribly flexible or useful.
Is it beautiful? Hell no. USB has bits of every standard grafted onto it to make it work. But the thing is it works. It's a "Just works" technology, and that's why it existed. If we'd tried to use Ethernet for all of this, we'd still be hooking keyboards up to PS/2 ports and mobile devices would need a collection of cables and plugs when they're "docked".
The NSA is currently, reportedly, collecting the meta data of every phone call made through the US. It's all simple source/destination/time/duration information, and they collect it regardless of whether the originating phone is owned by Glenn Greenwald or your mother.
(I'm assuming your mother is not a major whistleblower or some other dangerous subversive the government feels the need to keep tabs on.)
So why wouldn't they collect similar metadata from every airline and other transportation concern in the country about every single trip anyone makes that has a termination or origination or both point within the US? There's going to be less data to store than the phone metadata thing, and it's going to be just as useful.
If only there was a single XKCD cartoon that exposed the folly of assuming encryption is an adequate safeguard against totalitarian government thugs who have the power to physically or psychologically torture people.
Ah but there probably isn't so El Reg must be right...
They don't generally follow the rules here, with "Troll" and "Overrated" frequently used for (-1, Disagree); why would they on the Huffington Post, which is arguably even more partisan?
I'm sorry, but with the conviction and imprisonment of Bradley Manning today, there just aren't any cells left. Regrettably, this also means the US government is unable to prosecute torturers, war criminals, bankers who were responsible for the 2007 economic meltdown, or Dane Cook.
Until the government explicitly unbans living efficiently, complaining reform needs to be bottom up is absurd.
I don't drive an SUV, I drive a little Toyota, but I'd rather walk, or use quality public transportation. Unfortunately state and local governments have been exercising a war on walking since the early 1950s, implementing extremist pro-car zoning codes that force businesses to be built far away from the people they serve, and with large spaces between them so they can't be clustered.
There's no evidence that Americans have ever, as a group, wanted to be forced to drive everywhere - they've wanted the option to drive, but nobody outside of a small extreme group actually wants to be forced to drive first thing every morning, or after a hard day's work, or to and from a shop to get a gallon of milk. But with cities deliberately run down until relatively recently, and pro-car nutcases controlling the building of all new developments, that's been the effect.
Reportedly Linus Torvalds is hopping mad because five minutes after this game was stolen, someone downloaded the complete source code to the Linux kernel!
You don't have to solve world hunger to get into space. You do have to solve those kinds of problems if people are going to "live forever" (as in, not die of old age), with the resultant population boom that would result.
The only science that's been found to be behind it is that people are slightly less likely to lie if they think that a lie detector will call them out on it.
Monitoring breathing, et al, doesn't mean it is capable of detecting lies. Me saying "molecules", "atoms", and "memory" doesn't make homeopathy have a science between it either...
Nobody said anything about dying in misery.
(I, personally, want to die like my grandfather, peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.)
(OK, h/t to Bob Monkhouse, RIP.)
The more I've read about the proposal the more I think Musk is being deliberately deceitful and disingenuous, so "Elon Musk claims"... should be interpreted in a different light.
Just a recap:
1. The proposed hyperloop doesn't serve all of the cities that the HSR proposal does.
2. The proposed hyperloop requires an hour of transportation or more at both ends because it doesn't terminate anywhere near SF or LA. Meaning travel by Hyperloop will take longer than HSR in most cases.
3. The proposed hyperloop is supposedly a viaduct that can be built for $5M/mile. Either it is, in which case that's one cheap viaduct, and also a way HSR could be built more cheaply, or it isn't and it'll cost ten times that, like normal viaducts do.
4. The proposal makes outrageous and ridiculous claims about the energy efficiency of HSR, estimating it at being around 3x real world HSR systems use.
5. The "cheap" version of the Hyperloop will be cramped, like air travel.
It's usual for opponents of transit systems to pretend to be pro-transit and then um and ah about the costs, whittling down the proposal to something that nobody wants, "Oh, we know light rail would be popular and is exactly what this town needs, but, well, it's just very expensive, and a Bus Rapid Transit system would at least do most of what light rail is for, but at a fraction of the cost", and they make these arguments and finally the pro-transit people give in, recognizing that the fake proposal is better than nothing: and then it's put to the voters who vote against because it's a FUCKING BUS.
And here we have the same on a larger scale. In five years Elon Musk is proposing to build a giant viaduct at a fraction of the cost of any viaduct known to man using technologies that have never been used that doesn't go anywhere instead of that big expensive rail system everyone wants.
He's not trying to introduce a revolutionary new form of transport. He's trying to kill a legitimate rail project.
And if he said "Listen, I think HSR is too expensive, we should concentrate on improving our airports and roadways" I'd at least have some respect for him. But he's lying, he's telling lies to try to get the result he wants. What a slimeball.
The analogy would be even better if his predecessor was always running around peeking into people's windows, starting fights, and stealing people's diaries, and then Obama came along and said "This has to stop. I promise to change all this", and then when he gets into office he runs around peeking into people's windows, starts fights, steals people's diaries, and photocopies Michelle's diary and keeps a locked copy of it in his drawer, just, y'know, as a bonus eff-ewe.
While that's true, even "standard" networks aren't that similar. For example, T-Mobile USA is a completely open network that uses SIM cards and industry standard protocols. Unfortunately though, their spectrum allocations aren't similar to those of most carriers which means that this phone would be EDGE only in most of the country if used on T-Mobile.
It's the scanner bit. Basically it applies a heavy amount of compression to the final result by looking for blocks that match and duplicating them. Which is all fine until the copier sees what it thinks is a 0 but is actually an 8.
I think many people use the Troll option when they see "Clearly false". I'm familiar enough with Climategate to know that many on the right believes this nonsense, but nonsense it is.
Most of DNS at this point is too insecure for this to be a workable solution. What do I mean by that? Well, in theory a system called DNSSEC exists that's supposed to ensure you can guarantee a response from any DNS server is correct, that it hasn't been compromized by a MITM attack.
In practice, it requires involvement from numerous different organizations from the registrars to the DNS hosters, and most simply don't support DNSSEC at all.
FWIW it's also probably overloading the DNS system to incorporate this kind of functionality. In theory LDAP has existed for decades and ought to be perfectly capable of providing information that would allow a bog standard email client to get every bit of information needed to send an email to a [person] @ [domain], right down to forwarding that email to a different domain if need be. In practice... few people understand it, few people are willing to standardize on something they don't understand and add the standards needed to make it work, and so email continues to be an unholy clusterfood.
Honestly I've never heard the word "just" used that way. I can see it being used to imply that the work to be done is simple, "Oh it's easy to get to Kansas, just click your heels three times", but not that you pick a fraudulant way to appear to achieve what follows the word in order to save yourself time.
I agree the term "make up" is ambiguous but I don't think the "just" should be considered a qualifier here. I'd personally lean towards assuming the experiment is legit unless there's other good reasons to believe otherwise, given the language differences. If it's false, there's little chance the authors will not be found out in time, if only because scientists following the same research may for now make asssumptions that will be hopelessly wrong.
For reasons most of us don't understand (myself included) the Chromebook is apparently selling like hot cakes, with some manufacturers finding they sell more Chromebooks than all their Windows laptops put together.
And if you think that doesn't make sense, you're in good company, but you only have to look at sales of a device of an even more crippled laptop*, one that doesn't even have a keyboard and requires use only of applications (themselves even more stripped down than normal) that the manufacturer approves of, that costs more than many regular, full sized, full spec'd, laptops, to understand that the market doesn't always produce winners that nerds like you and me see as obvious.
* Four letters, first is lowercase. Rhymes with "Sad".
The fact we live in a modern economy where money changes hands electronically, with logs at the transaction level, shouldn't blind us to the fact that we haven't always lived like that, and taxes - income and sales - existed back when 99% of transactions took place by anonymously exchanging green pieces of paper.
If I buy a car in bitcoins, the car dealership is going to report a loss of one car in exchange for something and I'm going to report I bought one. Either our descriptions of the transactions will match, or we'll find ourselves audited.
War on ___? Bollocks. There's no need. There wasn't one forty years ago when few transactions involved credit cards, why would there be one one?
OK, to clarify, are we talking about the same technology used for, say, SD Cards? And if so, is there a serious risk that an SD card left in a box or on a shelf for an extended (say, half a decade) period of time will actually lose some or all of its contents?
Genuinely: what's this about regular old Flash being unable to store data for more than a year or three? Have I seriously misunderstood or is this a real problem I've been extremely lucky to avoid thus far?
Funny, I was kinda taught the opposite, that Pterodactyls were "flying Dinosaurs" but "completely unrelated to Birds" who were "entirely different" from Dinosaurs.
Turned out that a combination of my teachers not actually being that on-it, and the movement of science over the last 30-35 years, has meant I've had to relearn a lot of stuff that's turned out to be completely opposite to what I was taught.
Birds? Those are direct descendents of dinosaurs. Some even consider them "living" dinosaurs. There were even, according to the fossil evidence, dinos with feathers, which may even have been the majority - they didn't look like Rhinos/Hippos/Elephants, which makes sense given those are completely unrelated. If Jurassic Park were remade today, the CGI would be completely different.
It's been possible for a long time. There's an optional GMail extension that puts a number (number of unread emails, obviously) on the favicon that's continually updated, I have it installed for obvious reasons.
Unnecessary animated favicons I suspect would be so pointless that any website that used them would soon suffer a boycott, so I don't see that happening.