TCP and UDP are similar protocols that use IP as the transport.
How, exactly, are they similar? One's a datagram protocol, the other is a stream protocol. The two couldn't be more different. The only thing they have in common is that they both run over IP.
I wish people would stop parroting this fallacy all the time. Market share has nothing to do with how easy it is to break into a system.
Look at AROS! It has no security whatsoever, not even memory management between processes, so despite only having a hundred or so users, it must have zillions of virusses. But, of course, it DOESN'T. So far as I'm aware, nobody's bothered to write one, and it's unlikely any AROS virus would actually be effective.
All viruses require a reasonable level of market share to operate, because one of the principles they rely upon is a network effect, and you just plain cannot get a network effect without a decent market share. So marketshare is, very much, a pre-requisite for a successful virus. It's not the only one, but when people say "Mac OS X hasn't been attacked yet because it doesn't have enough marketshare", they're right. That's one fundamental reason. And unless you can show that any other reasons apply, it's likely to be the only reason.
If you have something like windows where security is bolted on after the fact, and OS that was never meant to be a multi-user OS connected to the internet (all these were added as features later on and done poorly) then you will have a system that is much harder to keep secure.
UNIX on the other hand was designed from day one to be networked multi-user OS, and security and separation of concerns was there from beginning.
It's frankly hilarious that Unix, on which the first worms operated, can be held up as some system that had security built-in from the start. It's also untrue that Windows, that is, the operating system known as Windows today, was "never meant to be a multi-user OS connected to the internet". Unless you're talking about Windows Me and its predecessors (98, 95, 3.1, et al), then that's completely false. Current versions of Windows (XP, Vista, 2003, et al) are derived from Windows NT, which was designed, from the beginning, to be "a multi-user OS connected to the internet".
In fact, Windows NT and its successors have a more advanced security model than Unix, allowing more than a separation of users and groups.
The issue with Windows is two fold. First, marketshare. And second, an over complex user-environment where too much functionality is available on the "user" side of the security wall. Both of these issues affected Unix up until the mid nineties, where its disproportionate share of Internet nodes and the amount of stuff running as the default user (which in Unix was root, which also happened to be the account with the most rights.)
There's little reason to believe that Mac OS X is protected from viruses by anything other than its low market share at this point. There's not a large enough group of users for network effects to take over. It is not an inherently secure operating system. The default user is generally set up with administration privileges, and it just takes a buffer overflow or other ordinary vulnerability in a client application like a web browser plug-in for a virus or worm to have complete access to the user's files, and enough access to be able to modify many of the applications the user is likely to run.
Fundamentally, Mac OS X has the same problem as Windows, and the same problem the "run-everything-as-root" Unixes did in the eighties and early nineties: too much functionality available to the default user. To fix this, you need to change the model somewhat. The very least Apple could do is set Mac OS X up so that the installer actively discourages setting up the default user as an administrator.
Gamers, VoIP and video conference users beware. The leading BitTorrent software authors have declared war on you - and any users wanting to wring high performance out of their networks
No, they haven't. What starts as a claim that BitTorrent has declared war on VoIP turns out to be a claim that BitTorrent has made a change to their protocols that might impact VoIP users as collateral damage - but ONLY if ISPs decide to engage in a foolish and moronic packet blocking scheme that would also impact DNS and therefore is unlikely to ever be implemented.
The article is choc-full of half truths and downright lies. The reality is that ISPs have many choices in how they "shape" user traffic, and the most obvious solutions (outside of upgrading their networks) that are fair rather than discriminatory are also the solutions that will have zero effect on VoIP users.
You can identify heavy bandwidth users and throttle their traffic. It's easy. Each packet has this thing called an IP address on it, that records where the packet is from, and another one recording where it goes to. If someone's identified as making heavy use of bandwidth at a time of peak congestion, you can use this hitherto completely unknown attribute of every IP packet to throttle traffic to and from that customer.
Easy. But it's not a knee jerk "It's BITTORRENT that's destroying out Internets!" response. So you get the Richard Bennetts of this world - who clearly have an agenda that's anti-BT rather than anti-bandwidth hogging - pretending it doesn't exist.
Why would you right click on it? Why wouldn't the operating system tell you what type the file has automatically?
You're insisting we have to make the file type part of the filename because of some false assumption that the operating system can and/or will only ever tell you the name of the file, that for some reason the name would only ever be the exposed metadata presented to the user. There is no reason why this would be the case.
The name is the name. There is no reason for the name to contain the file type any more than it should contain the date the file was created or the name of the person who created it. One could come up with equal justifications for either of those pieces of metadata to be part of the filename, and if it were the case that some third rate single-tasking binary loader like CP/M had done just that, and we were still using filesystems based upon said operating system's quirks, I don't doubt many people - probably yourself included - would come up with complaints about us moving that metadata out of the filename. "But how am I supposed to know who created this file?" they'd cry.
It's not the right place for this data, especially in a world where 50% of the population have no idea that.EXE is a program not a document, and 90% have no idea that.BAT is likewise.
How is appointing a lunatic with an opposite bent to Hollywood's going to result in the law being re-aligned with common sense?
What you're proposing will result in no reform whatsoever. It'll result in gridlock, with the current law, warts and all, continuing to rule the land unchanged and unchangeable.
What's needed is a moderate voice. Just because Lessig isn't a lunatic doesn't mean he's going to somehow compromise with lunatics on the other side. It means he'll be a respected voice that can shout down the extremists on the Hollywood end and propose reforms that will be taken seriously.
I don't think you understand how a default IPv6 set up works and I don't think the guy who's insulting you is being terribly helpful.
With IPv6, you get a huge block of addresses (as high as 2^80, approximately, though 2^64 is generally what people actually use and is often the limit for tunnel broker negotiated links) allocated to each network (that is, if your router is responsible for connecting to the Internet, then right now when it connects it gets 1 IPv4 address. But if it supports IPv6, it'll get, via 6to4 or a tunnel broker or a PPP-negotiated setup, a BLOCK of between 2^64 and 2^80 addresses. It can grab any of these for itself.)
That's your home network with all those IPv6 addresses. Your router accepts configuration requests by prepending the network prefix (the first 48 or 64 bits of your network's address) to a mangled version of the client's MAC address. It can then talk to the outside world. It has a globally routeable address. Any traffic with the first 48 bits of your client's IPv6 address will be routed to your router, and your router will send it to the client machine.
It's actually SIMPLER than your average NAT+DHCP router.
This isn't theory BTW, this is what I use at home. I have a bog-standard Earthlink DSL connection. Earthlink doesn't currently support IPv6. It doesn't do anything other than route IPv4 packets. The only block is does is on outgoing port 25 connections. That's it. It's your basic ISP.
My router understands 6to4 (I built it myself.) It turns the IPv4 address I get from Earthlink into a 6to4 network block. It tells every computer on my network what that computer's IPv6 address(es - yeah, more than one is allowed) are and that it does all the routing. Those addresses are static. They are ALL globally routeable, that is, they're real IP addresses, not equivalents of 10.x.x.x. My firewall set-up decides which machines should be allowed to receive incoming connections from the outside world. I have forward and reverse DNS set up for the IPv6 addresses.
My Powerbook, Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Thinkpad, Ubuntu VMs, and my wife's Vista machine are all connected and do not have any problems using it, and they "just worked" - I didn't have to configure them. I've noticed the Wii has an address but doesn't use it. My Dish Network box and HD DVD player do not ask for IPv6 addresses, so aren't routeable (though they do the IPv4 thing with NAT and 10.x.x.x.), my Nokia N800 also doesn't have any inbuilt IPv6 support though it's apparently a third party firmware update away from doing so.
This is what the situation is now. It's a working system. It doesn't use DHCPD, it uses RADVD. The router has lots of IPv6 addresses, it knows how to give them out, and the computers on my network that know IPv6 can get those addresses.
Plug and play. Most IPv6 set ups base IPv6 addresses on MAC addresses. This means everyone ends up with a predictable globally routeable static IP address (on each network they connect through) from the start. Plug and play functionality on IPv4 requires dynamic IP addresses (making them subject to change and unpredictable)
my ISP blocks all my IPv6 traffic simply because they don't support it?
IPv6 is available via 6to4 on IPv4 connections, or if your ISP really does block it (rather than just not support it), you can also try a tunnel broker.
The big advantage of the Apple set up is that their Airport routers have 6to4 support built-in. (The article is a little confusing, it's Apple's routers that are providing the advantage, not their desktops.)
That's exactly right. To get IPv6 working on my system at home, I just set up the router. My Powerbook, my Ubuntu machines, and my wife's Windows Vista machine, all automatically picked up IPv6 and can all connect to http://ipv6.google.com/
For those rolling their own router boxes, you can see what I did here (caution - it's my blog and this is a tag that brings up a bunch of articles, start reading at the bottom...) I used 6to4 as well. It's worth getting a static IP address if you plan to use 6to4, and it's also worth noting that some ISPs, notable BellSouth/AT&T FastAccess, actually block use of 6to4, for reasons I don't really understand. Before wasting any time on it, try to ping 192.88.99.1 from a machine directly connected to the Internet. If you get responses, you can do 6to4. If you don't, you're going to have to try one of the IPv6 tunnel brokers, which is a supremely inefficient way of doing everything and makes you dependent upon the goodwill of a third party.
I think if it were anything like as unreliable as, say, Fedora was at the time I tried both of them out, Ubuntu would have ended up in the dustbin of "Populist Distros nobody takes seriously." Shuttleworth has some marketing skills, and has done a good job, but Ubuntu needed to be a good distribution for it to be popular. That alone wouldn't have made it popular, but it was a prerequisite for success.
Whether APT/DEB was a key component to its success is anyone's guess. More likely was the fact it was built on Debian, which is how it ended up with APT/DEB in the first place.
I do agree with the GP's point that the LSB looks increasingly ridiculous standardizing on a packaging system that isn't common to most GNU/Linux installations. The LSB will not be relevant unless the standards it promotes are actually adopted. Of course, it'd be nice to see the RPM people work with the DEB people and come up with some interoperability.
It'll reduce the number of outlets which will affect availability and price.
Our area now has a Best Buy but for years we didn't, and I'd imagine there are plenty of parts of the country with no rival to Circuit City nearby. People living in those areas will buy less consumer electronics because they're less likely to be able to see what's available. People living in areas with only Best Buys will see higher prices, and also be less likely to buy as a result.
I don't know how strong the affect will be, but it will not be insignificant.
CC is also a major retailer of consumer electronics, so it's fair to say that Sony, Samsung, Apple, LG, Lenovo, Sinclair, Panasonic, Philips, Amstrad, Magnavox, Kenwood, Hitachi, JVC, Commodore, Pioneer, Nintendo and Vizio at the very least will be impacted by CC's closure.
Yes, it only took TEN YEARS for DIVX to completely destroy them!
I think Circuit City is suffering from the fact it's trying to push HDTVs and Blu-ray players in an economy that sucks. That's it. That's all it is. High priced luxury goods, nobody to buy them.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest it's somewhat improbable this was YouTube. The reason is YouTube's streaming rates are well below the "Half a gig per hour" rate I suggested for DVD quality video. Does she listen to net radio? Download music? HD movie trailers via Apple.com/quicktime? Is the Mac downloading updates? I know people find YouTube et al fairly addictive, but we're probably talking about needing to watch different YouTube videos for more than ten hours a day constantly before we'd start eating up 35Gb of data. That's ten hours of continuous watching, and no replays of the last video either. YouTube is 320x240 encoded using a 64kbps audio codec and a VBR video codec based upon H.263 (more recent versions use H.264) at around 260kbps. At those kinds of speeds, we're looking at around 100Mb per hour, nowhere near the rates I was talking about for ED or HD video.
Look for something else - net radio left on overnight, software updates, that kind of thing. I'm absolutely sure it's not YouTube.
You're not going to use it at "full usage" though. You need to look at the applications you'll be using and how they use bandwidth. The reason you need 3Mbps for something approaching DVD-quality video isn't because it's a constant 3Mbps stream, but because when there's a lot of action, the stream will need to "burst" up to rates that high.
Like I said, the current standard is around.5Gb per hour for DVD quality video, and around 2-3Gb for HD (720p) - that's based on what services like Apple's iTS and Netflix are doing. At those speeds, you're talking about 120 hours of DVD quality video (four hours a day), though only about 20 hours of HD quality video. But HD isn't really an option on 3Mbps except for buffered downloads, so the chances of you actually wanting to watch 20 hours of HD a month on your current connection is fairly small.
I'm not saying I agree with the 60Gb cap, I don't and I find the caps a completely wrong solution to the problem. But I don't think it will impact you in any way in terms of your use of DSL for watching movies from legitimate download/streaming services.
One of the candidates ran a 99% negative campaign against the other, and for several consecutive weeks didn't run a single ad that didn't contain at least one blatant falsehood. The other ran a 33% negative/66% positive campaign, and ran a mix of entirely accurate and sometimes false ads. One candidate picked a VP running mate that had never heard of Dred Scott (or possibly agreed with it...), who spoke entirely in demeaning folksisms, and seemed to either be stupid or making a deliberate effort to look stupid, the other a candidate that for the most part knew what he was talking about though occasionally also made major gaffes that were heavily reported. (And spoofed.)
Yes, Obama was going to get more positive press than McCain. That's because there was more positive news to write about. That's how it works. When there's positive news about one candidate, and very little positive about the other, the first candidate is going to get more positive coverage than the other. That's not bias. That's not favoritism. That's telling the truth.
The other networks, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc, do not make the political views of the commentators known.
Plenty of Fox commentators don't announce their political views (unsurprisingly, given apparently many of them are liberals who are paid to push a conservative agenda. The left has been using the term "Media Whore" for a while to describe these people, not just on Fox but on many of the other networks too, especially in the period from 1998-2003 where every news network was slanted so far to the right it's surprising the nation's TVs didn't topple over), and plenty of non-Fox commentators do. Some, like Chris Matthews, claim they're liberal (though spent the entire Clinton administration attacking him, voted for Bush, and supported Fred Thompson for President this time to a level many consider homo-erotic), others like Ken Olbermann and Phil Donahue have never made any secret of their liberalism.
The real issue with Fox is that it doesn't try to be balanced. It has few commentators that attempt to find the truth and report it. It does, occasionally, have some very strong journalists - Shepard Smith would spring to mind, but as a network it plugs a right wing agenda, distorts the news by over-reporting anti-liberal reports and under-reporting anti-conservative or pro-liberal reports, and promotes divisiveness and hatred. One black panther dominated Fox on election day. Prior to that bogus claims of election fraud were levelled against an anti-poverty group, so successfully the right still thinks ACORN was the aggressor, not the victim, and many on the right think ACORN was actually submitting votes rather than registrations. Ashley Todd's story was reported when Fox believed it, and then virtually wiped off the network when it became clear it was a hoax. I'm really not finding any evidence any of the other networks acted that way.
Given the ridiculously low bitrates YouTube employs, I can guarantee it will not be a problem for 99.999% of users.
Even HD downloads (720p, from services like Apple's iTS) tend to weigh in at around 4-6Gb at the moment (2-3Gb per hour), which would give you around 50 full-length HD movies a month if you have a Comcastic Internet connection. DVD-quality, done at H.264, tends to go for around half a gig per hour, or around one gig per movie, which gives you 250 full-length ED movies, 500 hours of video, per month, or around 16 hours of video PER DAY.
And realistically, the limits aren't going to go down either.
The golden age of IPTV, where you subscribe to the TV stations you want individually, is quite possible with the existing infrastructure and Internet services. What we need are standardized STBs to hook up to the TVs, and TV stations willing to offer subscriptions.
Plus for maximum fun, thinking you're in insert mode because you slipped and hit the wrong key, and actually finding you're in command mode and have just made about 452 different random changes to your document with no idea of what has happened or how to fix it...
I don't think RMS would even take it. Being in government requires adherence to a set of principles that many people end up finding reduces their ability to be principled. As an example, RMS would be required to back, in public, copyright law policies that he in private would vehemently disagree with. I just don't see RMS doing that, he's too much of a man of principle.
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How, exactly, are they similar? One's a datagram protocol, the other is a stream protocol. The two couldn't be more different. The only thing they have in common is that they both run over IP.
Look at AROS! It has no security whatsoever, not even memory management between processes, so despite only having a hundred or so users, it must have zillions of virusses. But, of course, it DOESN'T. So far as I'm aware, nobody's bothered to write one, and it's unlikely any AROS virus would actually be effective.
All viruses require a reasonable level of market share to operate, because one of the principles they rely upon is a network effect, and you just plain cannot get a network effect without a decent market share. So marketshare is, very much, a pre-requisite for a successful virus. It's not the only one, but when people say "Mac OS X hasn't been attacked yet because it doesn't have enough marketshare", they're right. That's one fundamental reason. And unless you can show that any other reasons apply, it's likely to be the only reason.
It's frankly hilarious that Unix, on which the first worms operated, can be held up as some system that had security built-in from the start. It's also untrue that Windows, that is, the operating system known as Windows today, was "never meant to be a multi-user OS connected to the internet". Unless you're talking about Windows Me and its predecessors (98, 95, 3.1, et al), then that's completely false. Current versions of Windows (XP, Vista, 2003, et al) are derived from Windows NT, which was designed, from the beginning, to be "a multi-user OS connected to the internet".
In fact, Windows NT and its successors have a more advanced security model than Unix, allowing more than a separation of users and groups.
The issue with Windows is two fold. First, marketshare. And second, an over complex user-environment where too much functionality is available on the "user" side of the security wall. Both of these issues affected Unix up until the mid nineties, where its disproportionate share of Internet nodes and the amount of stuff running as the default user (which in Unix was root, which also happened to be the account with the most rights.)
There's little reason to believe that Mac OS X is protected from viruses by anything other than its low market share at this point. There's not a large enough group of users for network effects to take over. It is not an inherently secure operating system. The default user is generally set up with administration privileges, and it just takes a buffer overflow or other ordinary vulnerability in a client application like a web browser plug-in for a virus or worm to have complete access to the user's files, and enough access to be able to modify many of the applications the user is likely to run.
Fundamentally, Mac OS X has the same problem as Windows, and the same problem the "run-everything-as-root" Unixes did in the eighties and early nineties: too much functionality available to the default user. To fix this, you need to change the model somewhat. The very least Apple could do is set Mac OS X up so that the installer actively discourages setting up the default user as an administrator.
Geez, it was two thousand years ago! Will you let it go already?
No, they haven't. What starts as a claim that BitTorrent has declared war on VoIP turns out to be a claim that BitTorrent has made a change to their protocols that might impact VoIP users as collateral damage - but ONLY if ISPs decide to engage in a foolish and moronic packet blocking scheme that would also impact DNS and therefore is unlikely to ever be implemented.
The article is choc-full of half truths and downright lies. The reality is that ISPs have many choices in how they "shape" user traffic, and the most obvious solutions (outside of upgrading their networks) that are fair rather than discriminatory are also the solutions that will have zero effect on VoIP users.
You can identify heavy bandwidth users and throttle their traffic. It's easy. Each packet has this thing called an IP address on it, that records where the packet is from, and another one recording where it goes to. If someone's identified as making heavy use of bandwidth at a time of peak congestion, you can use this hitherto completely unknown attribute of every IP packet to throttle traffic to and from that customer.
Easy. But it's not a knee jerk "It's BITTORRENT that's destroying out Internets!" response. So you get the Richard Bennetts of this world - who clearly have an agenda that's anti-BT rather than anti-bandwidth hogging - pretending it doesn't exist.
Idiots.
Why would you right click on it? Why wouldn't the operating system tell you what type the file has automatically?
You're insisting we have to make the file type part of the filename because of some false assumption that the operating system can and/or will only ever tell you the name of the file, that for some reason the name would only ever be the exposed metadata presented to the user. There is no reason why this would be the case.
The name is the name. There is no reason for the name to contain the file type any more than it should contain the date the file was created or the name of the person who created it. One could come up with equal justifications for either of those pieces of metadata to be part of the filename, and if it were the case that some third rate single-tasking binary loader like CP/M had done just that, and we were still using filesystems based upon said operating system's quirks, I don't doubt many people - probably yourself included - would come up with complaints about us moving that metadata out of the filename. "But how am I supposed to know who created this file?" they'd cry.
It's not the right place for this data, especially in a world where 50% of the population have no idea that .EXE is a program not a document, and 90% have no idea that .BAT is likewise.
How is appointing a lunatic with an opposite bent to Hollywood's going to result in the law being re-aligned with common sense?
What you're proposing will result in no reform whatsoever. It'll result in gridlock, with the current law, warts and all, continuing to rule the land unchanged and unchangeable.
What's needed is a moderate voice. Just because Lessig isn't a lunatic doesn't mean he's going to somehow compromise with lunatics on the other side. It means he'll be a respected voice that can shout down the extremists on the Hollywood end and propose reforms that will be taken seriously.
I don't think you understand how a default IPv6 set up works and I don't think the guy who's insulting you is being terribly helpful.
With IPv6, you get a huge block of addresses (as high as 2^80, approximately, though 2^64 is generally what people actually use and is often the limit for tunnel broker negotiated links) allocated to each network (that is, if your router is responsible for connecting to the Internet, then right now when it connects it gets 1 IPv4 address. But if it supports IPv6, it'll get, via 6to4 or a tunnel broker or a PPP-negotiated setup, a BLOCK of between 2^64 and 2^80 addresses. It can grab any of these for itself.)
That's your home network with all those IPv6 addresses. Your router accepts configuration requests by prepending the network prefix (the first 48 or 64 bits of your network's address) to a mangled version of the client's MAC address. It can then talk to the outside world. It has a globally routeable address. Any traffic with the first 48 bits of your client's IPv6 address will be routed to your router, and your router will send it to the client machine.
It's actually SIMPLER than your average NAT+DHCP router.
This isn't theory BTW, this is what I use at home. I have a bog-standard Earthlink DSL connection. Earthlink doesn't currently support IPv6. It doesn't do anything other than route IPv4 packets. The only block is does is on outgoing port 25 connections. That's it. It's your basic ISP.
My router understands 6to4 (I built it myself.) It turns the IPv4 address I get from Earthlink into a 6to4 network block. It tells every computer on my network what that computer's IPv6 address(es - yeah, more than one is allowed) are and that it does all the routing. Those addresses are static. They are ALL globally routeable, that is, they're real IP addresses, not equivalents of 10.x.x.x. My firewall set-up decides which machines should be allowed to receive incoming connections from the outside world. I have forward and reverse DNS set up for the IPv6 addresses.
My Powerbook, Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Thinkpad, Ubuntu VMs, and my wife's Vista machine are all connected and do not have any problems using it, and they "just worked" - I didn't have to configure them. I've noticed the Wii has an address but doesn't use it. My Dish Network box and HD DVD player do not ask for IPv6 addresses, so aren't routeable (though they do the IPv4 thing with NAT and 10.x.x.x.), my Nokia N800 also doesn't have any inbuilt IPv6 support though it's apparently a third party firmware update away from doing so.
This is what the situation is now. It's a working system. It doesn't use DHCPD, it uses RADVD. The router has lots of IPv6 addresses, it knows how to give them out, and the computers on my network that know IPv6 can get those addresses.
Does that help?
Plug and play. Most IPv6 set ups base IPv6 addresses on MAC addresses. This means everyone ends up with a predictable globally routeable static IP address (on each network they connect through) from the start. Plug and play functionality on IPv4 requires dynamic IP addresses (making them subject to change and unpredictable)
IPv6 is available via 6to4 on IPv4 connections, or if your ISP really does block it (rather than just not support it), you can also try a tunnel broker.
The big advantage of the Apple set up is that their Airport routers have 6to4 support built-in. (The article is a little confusing, it's Apple's routers that are providing the advantage, not their desktops.)
That's exactly right. To get IPv6 working on my system at home, I just set up the router. My Powerbook, my Ubuntu machines, and my wife's Windows Vista machine, all automatically picked up IPv6 and can all connect to http://ipv6.google.com/
For those rolling their own router boxes, you can see what I did here (caution - it's my blog and this is a tag that brings up a bunch of articles, start reading at the bottom...) I used 6to4 as well. It's worth getting a static IP address if you plan to use 6to4, and it's also worth noting that some ISPs, notable BellSouth/AT&T FastAccess, actually block use of 6to4, for reasons I don't really understand. Before wasting any time on it, try to ping 192.88.99.1 from a machine directly connected to the Internet. If you get responses, you can do 6to4. If you don't, you're going to have to try one of the IPv6 tunnel brokers, which is a supremely inefficient way of doing everything and makes you dependent upon the goodwill of a third party.
Top Ten Figures in Slashdot Trolling, from a pattern described here. Yeah, it's my own joke, but whatever. I enjoyed writing it.
I think he was actually saying that Verizon's ad campaign sucks, but maybe I read it differently to how you did.
I think if it were anything like as unreliable as, say, Fedora was at the time I tried both of them out, Ubuntu would have ended up in the dustbin of "Populist Distros nobody takes seriously." Shuttleworth has some marketing skills, and has done a good job, but Ubuntu needed to be a good distribution for it to be popular. That alone wouldn't have made it popular, but it was a prerequisite for success.
Whether APT/DEB was a key component to its success is anyone's guess. More likely was the fact it was built on Debian, which is how it ended up with APT/DEB in the first place.
I do agree with the GP's point that the LSB looks increasingly ridiculous standardizing on a packaging system that isn't common to most GNU/Linux installations. The LSB will not be relevant unless the standards it promotes are actually adopted. Of course, it'd be nice to see the RPM people work with the DEB people and come up with some interoperability.
What's a modem?
It'll reduce the number of outlets which will affect availability and price.
Our area now has a Best Buy but for years we didn't, and I'd imagine there are plenty of parts of the country with no rival to Circuit City nearby. People living in those areas will buy less consumer electronics because they're less likely to be able to see what's available. People living in areas with only Best Buys will see higher prices, and also be less likely to buy as a result.
I don't know how strong the affect will be, but it will not be insignificant.
CC is also a major retailer of consumer electronics, so it's fair to say that Sony, Samsung, Apple, LG, Lenovo, Sinclair, Panasonic, Philips, Amstrad, Magnavox, Kenwood, Hitachi, JVC, Commodore, Pioneer, Nintendo and Vizio at the very least will be impacted by CC's closure.
Too likely to get into trouble. A simpler solution is to do exactly what the manager is asking for: show them the receipt. But at the Returns desk.
Yes, it only took TEN YEARS for DIVX to completely destroy them!
I think Circuit City is suffering from the fact it's trying to push HDTVs and Blu-ray players in an economy that sucks. That's it. That's all it is. High priced luxury goods, nobody to buy them.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest it's somewhat improbable this was YouTube. The reason is YouTube's streaming rates are well below the "Half a gig per hour" rate I suggested for DVD quality video. Does she listen to net radio? Download music? HD movie trailers via Apple.com/quicktime? Is the Mac downloading updates? I know people find YouTube et al fairly addictive, but we're probably talking about needing to watch different YouTube videos for more than ten hours a day constantly before we'd start eating up 35Gb of data. That's ten hours of continuous watching, and no replays of the last video either. YouTube is 320x240 encoded using a 64kbps audio codec and a VBR video codec based upon H.263 (more recent versions use H.264) at around 260kbps. At those kinds of speeds, we're looking at around 100Mb per hour, nowhere near the rates I was talking about for ED or HD video.
Look for something else - net radio left on overnight, software updates, that kind of thing. I'm absolutely sure it's not YouTube.
You're not going to use it at "full usage" though. You need to look at the applications you'll be using and how they use bandwidth. The reason you need 3Mbps for something approaching DVD-quality video isn't because it's a constant 3Mbps stream, but because when there's a lot of action, the stream will need to "burst" up to rates that high.
Like I said, the current standard is around .5Gb per hour for DVD quality video, and around 2-3Gb for HD (720p) - that's based on what services like Apple's iTS and Netflix are doing. At those speeds, you're talking about 120 hours of DVD quality video (four hours a day), though only about 20 hours of HD quality video. But HD isn't really an option on 3Mbps except for buffered downloads, so the chances of you actually wanting to watch 20 hours of HD a month on your current connection is fairly small.
I'm not saying I agree with the 60Gb cap, I don't and I find the caps a completely wrong solution to the problem. But I don't think it will impact you in any way in terms of your use of DSL for watching movies from legitimate download/streaming services.
EXACTLY!
One of the candidates ran a 99% negative campaign against the other, and for several consecutive weeks didn't run a single ad that didn't contain at least one blatant falsehood. The other ran a 33% negative/66% positive campaign, and ran a mix of entirely accurate and sometimes false ads. One candidate picked a VP running mate that had never heard of Dred Scott (or possibly agreed with it...), who spoke entirely in demeaning folksisms, and seemed to either be stupid or making a deliberate effort to look stupid, the other a candidate that for the most part knew what he was talking about though occasionally also made major gaffes that were heavily reported. (And spoofed.)
Yes, Obama was going to get more positive press than McCain. That's because there was more positive news to write about. That's how it works. When there's positive news about one candidate, and very little positive about the other, the first candidate is going to get more positive coverage than the other. That's not bias. That's not favoritism. That's telling the truth.
Plenty of Fox commentators don't announce their political views (unsurprisingly, given apparently many of them are liberals who are paid to push a conservative agenda. The left has been using the term "Media Whore" for a while to describe these people, not just on Fox but on many of the other networks too, especially in the period from 1998-2003 where every news network was slanted so far to the right it's surprising the nation's TVs didn't topple over), and plenty of non-Fox commentators do. Some, like Chris Matthews, claim they're liberal (though spent the entire Clinton administration attacking him, voted for Bush, and supported Fred Thompson for President this time to a level many consider homo-erotic), others like Ken Olbermann and Phil Donahue have never made any secret of their liberalism.
The real issue with Fox is that it doesn't try to be balanced. It has few commentators that attempt to find the truth and report it. It does, occasionally, have some very strong journalists - Shepard Smith would spring to mind, but as a network it plugs a right wing agenda, distorts the news by over-reporting anti-liberal reports and under-reporting anti-conservative or pro-liberal reports, and promotes divisiveness and hatred. One black panther dominated Fox on election day. Prior to that bogus claims of election fraud were levelled against an anti-poverty group, so successfully the right still thinks ACORN was the aggressor, not the victim, and many on the right think ACORN was actually submitting votes rather than registrations. Ashley Todd's story was reported when Fox believed it, and then virtually wiped off the network when it became clear it was a hoax. I'm really not finding any evidence any of the other networks acted that way.
Given the ridiculously low bitrates YouTube employs, I can guarantee it will not be a problem for 99.999% of users.
Even HD downloads (720p, from services like Apple's iTS) tend to weigh in at around 4-6Gb at the moment (2-3Gb per hour), which would give you around 50 full-length HD movies a month if you have a Comcastic Internet connection. DVD-quality, done at H.264, tends to go for around half a gig per hour, or around one gig per movie, which gives you 250 full-length ED movies, 500 hours of video, per month, or around 16 hours of video PER DAY.
And realistically, the limits aren't going to go down either.
The golden age of IPTV, where you subscribe to the TV stations you want individually, is quite possible with the existing infrastructure and Internet services. What we need are standardized STBs to hook up to the TVs, and TV stations willing to offer subscriptions.
Plus for maximum fun, thinking you're in insert mode because you slipped and hit the wrong key, and actually finding you're in command mode and have just made about 452 different random changes to your document with no idea of what has happened or how to fix it...
I don't think RMS would even take it. Being in government requires adherence to a set of principles that many people end up finding reduces their ability to be principled. As an example, RMS would be required to back, in public, copyright law policies that he in private would vehemently disagree with. I just don't see RMS doing that, he's too much of a man of principle.