I like my Windows XP virtual machines running in VirtualBox. I can use them to connect to client VPNs without having the VPN client disrupt my network access, run different versions of software in separate environments, etc.
I could possibly consider moving to Windows 7, but apart from being able to search for programs from the Start menu, i really don't see any advantage. For a modern browser, Firefox & Chrome run perfectly when I need them.
I fully intend to keep running my WinXP VMs well into the future, but obviously not on the public internet. I probably should investigate using a Linux VM, but why change what works?
That the west, esp. USA, is dropping their emissions, but china alone, emits more each year that destroys those savings. IOW, China is increasing faster than what the entire west can cut. This does NOT include other nations.
The two problems you need to solve are decedance and entitlement.
In Australia we've seen distinct waves of immigration: Europe after WWII, Vietnam in 70's. The parents work hard in low skilled jobs and push their kids to study hard. The kids become the doctors & lawyers, but the grandkids start to assimilate and don't work as hard. Coupled with this, the majority of society expects handouts from the government, but do not contribute back.
As for real men, what you are asking for is a benevolent dictator. The problem is very few have the moral character suitable for the job and they are almost always betrayed by corruption of the next couple of levels down.
Finally, I find it sad that rather than celebrating the achievement of the Chinese, there is more discussion about decay in the USA.
You might want to read Gut and Psychology Syndrome | GAPS Diet by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride. Some doctors in the UK and US are using this approach to treat autism with good results, but there no published studies that I'm aware of. The main focus points of the book are probiotics (like kefir) and eliminating artificial additives (e.g preservatives, colours & flavours), gluten and casein.
Friends with autistic children have noticed improvement by following the book, but as others have said autism is complex and not fully understood. We've noticed significant behavioural improvements, eczema cured and disappearnce of mystery ankle pains in our own non-autistic kids by eliminating presevatives, especially 282 found in many bread products. I wouldn't consider it scientifically proven but since the cost is minimal and risks (almost) non-existant, I would recommend trialing a GAPS diet.
Probiotics are now recommended by some doctors to restore gut health after a course of antibiotics.
The draft NBNCo Corporate Plan (2013) is available to understand what Labor were building. The reality is Labor turned the abundance of fibre into a scarce resource:
"As at 30 April 2013, 26% of NBN Co’s FTTP End-Users were on the highest available wholesale speed tier (100/40 Mbps), whilst 47% were on the entry-level wholesale speed tier (12/1 Mbps). These compare with 18% and 49% respectively forecast for FY2013 in the 2012-15 Corporate Plan."
Considering that it is $5 extra for 25Mbps, that 50% connected at 12Mbps are likely to place very low demands on their internet connection, making them perfect customers for mobile wireless especially if they use their mobile phone plan and once the heavier mobile wireless users migrate to a fixed line connection.
So if G.Fast can extend VDSL2 to 1 Gigabit at a couple hundred meters, are people really going to outgrow that by the end of the decade?
Since the average speed in Australia is 4.8mbit now it seems unlikely that people are going to be demanding 10gigabit connections in 7 years. Even 100mbit would be about 20 times their current average and VDSL2 can already do 100mbit for short distances.
In April 2013 according to the draft NBNCo Corporate Plan (2013) 47% of fibre connections were 12Mbps and the trend was up. The long term predictions out to 2028, show this barely changing while there is some movement in the faster plans (100Mbps) to even faster plans. In 2028 the percentage of 1Gbps is predicted to be still less than 5%.
And then when someone moves, and the previous occupier had fibre, but the new one doesnt want it, do you just leave that infrastructure floating?
One of the promises of fibre is that it is cheaper to maintain than copper so fibre on demand plans should be cheaper than FTTN of FTTP because the installation payment (~$3000) is made up front (or plan payments with ISP). Might sound expensive until you realise just the connection (AVC) for 1Gbps is $150/month to which you need to add RSP costs (including data at data (CVC) at $20/Mbps).
If youre going to do anything down a street you might as well do it just once, and get everyone on it in one go and then pull out the old infrastructure. They could probably recoup some of the build cost by recycling all of the copper they could pull out.
The problem is you need to find people who are willing to pay for the service. Current targets are for 70% of premises to connect and of that 50% will connect at 12Mbps and less than 5% connecting at 1Gbps in 2028.
This makes zero sense, since 25/5Mbps supports ample bandwith for HD video streaming. Telstra (50% owners of FoxTel) initially limited ADSL1 to 1.5Mbps to protect FoxTel and it was only when others installed their own DSLAMs that this limit was raised.
The draft NBNCo Corporate Plan (2013) is available to understand what Labor were building. The reality is Labor turned the abundance of fibre into a scarce resource:
"As at 30 April 2013, 26% of NBN Co’s FTTP End-Users were on the highest available wholesale speed tier (100/40 Mbps), whilst 47% were on the entry-level wholesale speed tier (12/1 Mbps). These compare with 18% and 49% respectively forecast for FY2013 in the 2012-15 Corporate Plan."
In Australia, Labor planned both quotas (1TB being the largest available from most RSPs) and speed tiers from 12/1Mbps to 1Gbps. The plan was for less than 5% to have 1Gbps speeds in 2028! This is because the high cost of data to RSPs ($20/Mbps) will make 1Gbps plans expensive.
Only a truly incompetent government could succeed in building a FTTP network where 50% of connections are slower than HFC, FTTN, 4G and approaching half of ADSL2+ connections. Sadly many in Australia were distracted by the headline speeds and failed to appreciate what was being promised.
The best suggestion I've heard yet is to simply loan Google $20 billion interest free for two decades and ask them to build a wholesale network.
The point is that my government is doing that, and I strongly disapprove of it. Your government is doing that and you (perhaps) strongly disapprove of it. If we have the luck to live in democracies, it's our fucking duty to do something about it.
Actually, I'm not sure I disapprove of the Australian government spying on Indonesia. There are a number of issues in Indonesia that impact on Australia directly including: government stability, fundamentalist Islam, asylum seekers, human rights abuses (e.g Aceh, East Timor and West Papua). Having inside knowledge of the government's thoughts could prevent misteps and assist Australia in working with Indonesia using soft power.
In a democracy the elected member of the government are expandable. We can LITERALLY, replace them over night. They do no need extra 'security'. This is the strength of democracy; for as long as there are citizens we can find, among ourselves, a new leader to replace the previous one.
I'd suggest it is wise to provide elected members with an appropriate income and protection because theoretically it should reduce the ability of others to corrupt them. However I use the word theoretically because in many countries the influencers have become very sophisticated at manipulation.
So, that's about $13 / GB. AT&T (ie. the global rip off artist of the century) basically charges $10 / GB to inividuals.
Cheap by Australian standards. Telstra charge $25 for 1GB, with excess data at 10c/MB or $40 with no excess data charges. You can pay $95 for 15GB with same excess data 10c/MB excess data charge. The prepaid option is even worse $20 for 250MB up to $180 for 12GB.
amaysim's $9.90 for 1GB or $29.90 for 4GB is about as cheap as it gets in Australia.
Speaking on behalf of the rest of the world, we are very thankful that the USA has timezones. I'm too scared to think what Windows would be like if it was written to support a single timezone.
Remember when you talk about the poor in the states, you're talking about an ever growing % of your population. People aren't getting dumber, so something must be happening...
Fetal alcohol syndrome could actually mean people are getting dumber. Secondly, looking at the current primary school kids in government schools from less socially well off areas, there is cause for concern that the education system is failing kids. Although having said that I'm not convinced that it is the education system, but more likely parents.
I live comfortably on about $500-700 per month in the Phoenix area.
Newstart (Unemployment) benefits are $501 fortnight in Australia for a single, no children. On top of that is rent assitance and medicare which provides (almost) free healthcare.
There are a few places where the potential reward for investment make sense. Most high security environments (e.g. military, foreign embassies, etc) use separate networks to maintain security. Data is transferred from less classified networks to more classified networks via external media frequently, but not the other way. Standard practice is for two (or more) computers to exist on a person's desk with access to networks with a different level of classification. That person may be able to transfer files using a USB key. One of those is most likely a laptop that connects to external networks and which might be possible to compromise, particularly with a targetted attack. If the primary purpose is extraction of data, then a very sensitive listener could be sufficient.
I suspect that if this is at all possible, NSA (and other organisations) would be prepared to spend big on research because jumping an air gap could have huge rewards. It wouldn't surprise me that if this wasn't available now, there would be people from various organisations would have been researching since the story broke.
I think the easiest way to prove / disprove this would be to check the security policies of various organisations. If there are indications in the policies of measures to prevent this kind of attack (e.g. internal speakers removed, headphones only), then I think some credence should be given to the claims.
I've found WinXP running in a VM the sanest way to connect to the VPNs of various clients that I work with. Many VPN clients attempt to take over the entire network stack and direct all your traffic through their VPN which creates havoc with accessing company servers.
With WinXP I can clone a VM for different clients. I tried this with Windows7 and ran into activiation nightmares. Possibly not strictly legal, but I refuse to fork out cash just because different VPN clients won't play nicely with each other on the same instance.
One way of doing this is simply having a unit of, perhaps, 1Mbps, with offerings based on multiples of that. Grandma might have a 1Mbps service for her occasional e-mail and web-browsing, plus the occasional software update; the guy who regularly syncs with every open source repository might pay for a 10Mbps service (which, in the middle of the night, gets 200Mbps).
The problem with this is that once a week, Grandma has a video conference with the grandkids for half an hour. The experience would be better if Grandma had a 100Mbps connection, but Grandma is unlikely to justify the extra expense just for that short call.
A 1Gbps connection is capable of 324TB a month. For a residential user that is a huge amount of data, yet because it is available some customers will download torrents to/dev/null simply because they can.
Quotas are a much more reasonable approach than speed tiers and likelier to lead to faster speeds because ISPs will want you to be able to download more data so they can charge you more. If you happen to blow through your quota in the first day, then you are capped to 128Kbps for the rest of the month and learn for next month or purchase additional quota. Excess usage charges should be banned because of potential bill shock.
Use a fair allocation scheme - as total bandwidth becomes saturated, drop the max rate down until it's no longer saturated.
This was tried in Australia by Internode and called the FlatRate plan. I've provided details in another post. In short it failed because Grandma opts for the low quota plan because it is cheaper, resulting in only heavy users being on the FlatRate plan. This made it unsustainable compared to fixed quota tiers because users preferred the certainty of having 100GB, 300GB, etc a month.
The difference between the Australian & USA market is that we've pretty much always had quotas. Customers choose the quota they want (30GB through to 1TB). Quotas are implemented as full speed until you reach your quota and the speed is capped to 256Kbps or 128Kbps for the rest of the month. Some RSPs allow you to buy additional data blocks. Some ISPs also offer extra downloads during off peak times (midnight to 8am) which are good for scheduling downloads.
The fact is that ISPs run networks with contention and in cheaper ISPs that leads to congestion in peak hours. There is not dedicated bandwidth between your PC and the server you want to connect with. Quotas are a reasonable way for ISPs to manage network traffic and make it cheaper to offer faster speeds. Bandwidth is a shared resource, which some people over exploit impacting on others. This is referred to as the Tragedy of the commons.
Would you prefer 8Mbps with no quota or 100Mbps with a 1TB quota?
Even without that, Linux plays very nicely with Android phones. You can set up all sorts of integration between them.
I think this point would have more weight if you added some examples. Two weeks ago I purchased my first android phone. I haven't had time to play with it much, but I'd like to know answers to the following questions.
1. How do I have photos taken on my Nexus 4 automatically copied to an nfs share when the phone connects to my home wireless network?
2. How do I regularly copy certain files from my server to the Nexus 4?
Slashdot Mirror
I like my Windows XP virtual machines running in VirtualBox. I can use them to connect to client VPNs without having the VPN client disrupt my network access, run different versions of software in separate environments, etc.
I could possibly consider moving to Windows 7, but apart from being able to search for programs from the Start menu, i really don't see any advantage. For a modern browser, Firefox & Chrome run perfectly when I need them.
I fully intend to keep running my WinXP VMs well into the future, but obviously not on the public internet. I probably should investigate using a Linux VM, but why change what works?
That the west, esp. USA, is dropping their emissions, but china alone, emits more each year that destroys those savings. IOW, China is increasing faster than what the entire west can cut. This does NOT include other nations.
What happens when you use a per head of population metric? A http://io9.com/this-map-shows-which-countries-are-contributing-the-mos-1502047155 ranks Australia as low, but our population is 22.7million (0.33%). Compare that with China (1.351 billion = 19.1%) or USA (317.5 million = 4.45%).
The two problems you need to solve are decedance and entitlement.
In Australia we've seen distinct waves of immigration: Europe after WWII, Vietnam in 70's. The parents work hard in low skilled jobs and push their kids to study hard. The kids become the doctors & lawyers, but the grandkids start to assimilate and don't work as hard. Coupled with this, the majority of society expects handouts from the government, but do not contribute back.
As for real men, what you are asking for is a benevolent dictator. The problem is very few have the moral character suitable for the job and they are almost always betrayed by corruption of the next couple of levels down.
Finally, I find it sad that rather than celebrating the achievement of the Chinese, there is more discussion about decay in the USA.
The question I want to know is will this be an option on my first driverless car? It would be helpful if a button for circle work was also provided.
So does the $45 billiion and many of the assumptions about the roll out have been shown to be wrong.
You might want to read Gut and Psychology Syndrome | GAPS Diet by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride. Some doctors in the UK and US are using this approach to treat autism with good results, but there no published studies that I'm aware of. The main focus points of the book are probiotics (like kefir) and eliminating artificial additives (e.g preservatives, colours & flavours), gluten and casein.
Friends with autistic children have noticed improvement by following the book, but as others have said autism is complex and not fully understood. We've noticed significant behavioural improvements, eczema cured and disappearnce of mystery ankle pains in our own non-autistic kids by eliminating presevatives, especially 282 found in many bread products. I wouldn't consider it scientifically proven but since the cost is minimal and risks (almost) non-existant, I would recommend trialing a GAPS diet.
Probiotics are now recommended by some doctors to restore gut health after a course of antibiotics.
The draft NBNCo Corporate Plan (2013) is available to understand what Labor were building. The reality is Labor turned the abundance of fibre into a scarce resource:
Considering that it is $5 extra for 25Mbps, that 50% connected at 12Mbps are likely to place very low demands on their internet connection, making them perfect customers for mobile wireless especially if they use their mobile phone plan and once the heavier mobile wireless users migrate to a fixed line connection.
For an additional 20% now we could have a network that can deliver all of our demands for bandwidth for the next century.
Coalition plan: $29 billion, Labor plan: $45 billion. Last time I checked that is an additional 50%.
So if G.Fast can extend VDSL2 to 1 Gigabit at a couple hundred meters, are people really going to outgrow that by the end of the decade?
Since the average speed in Australia is 4.8mbit now it seems unlikely that people are going to be demanding 10gigabit connections in 7 years. Even 100mbit would be about 20 times their current average and VDSL2 can already do 100mbit for short distances.
In April 2013 according to the draft NBNCo Corporate Plan (2013) 47% of fibre connections were 12Mbps and the trend was up. The long term predictions out to 2028, show this barely changing while there is some movement in the faster plans (100Mbps) to even faster plans. In 2028 the percentage of 1Gbps is predicted to be still less than 5%.
And then when someone moves, and the previous occupier had fibre, but the new one doesnt want it, do you just leave that infrastructure floating?
One of the promises of fibre is that it is cheaper to maintain than copper so fibre on demand plans should be cheaper than FTTN of FTTP because the installation payment (~$3000) is made up front (or plan payments with ISP). Might sound expensive until you realise just the connection (AVC) for 1Gbps is $150/month to which you need to add RSP costs (including data at data (CVC) at $20/Mbps).
If youre going to do anything down a street you might as well do it just once, and get everyone on it in one go and then pull out the old infrastructure. They could probably recoup some of the build cost by recycling all of the copper they could pull out.
The problem is you need to find people who are willing to pay for the service. Current targets are for 70% of premises to connect and of that 50% will connect at 12Mbps and less than 5% connecting at 1Gbps in 2028.
This makes zero sense, since 25/5Mbps supports ample bandwith for HD video streaming. Telstra (50% owners of FoxTel) initially limited ADSL1 to 1.5Mbps to protect FoxTel and it was only when others installed their own DSLAMs that this limit was raised.
The draft NBNCo Corporate Plan (2013) is available to understand what Labor were building. The reality is Labor turned the abundance of fibre into a scarce resource:
In Australia, Labor planned both quotas (1TB being the largest available from most RSPs) and speed tiers from 12/1Mbps to 1Gbps. The plan was for less than 5% to have 1Gbps speeds in 2028! This is because the high cost of data to RSPs ($20/Mbps) will make 1Gbps plans expensive.
Only a truly incompetent government could succeed in building a FTTP network where 50% of connections are slower than HFC, FTTN, 4G and approaching half of ADSL2+ connections. Sadly many in Australia were distracted by the headline speeds and failed to appreciate what was being promised.
The best suggestion I've heard yet is to simply loan Google $20 billion interest free for two decades and ask them to build a wholesale network.
I'm waiting until Sony offer a deal on TVs which includes a free PS4. This is why I was able to purchase a PS3 without the wife complaining.
The point is that my government is doing that, and I strongly disapprove of it. Your government is doing that and you (perhaps) strongly disapprove of it. If we have the luck to live in democracies, it's our fucking duty to do something about it.
Actually, I'm not sure I disapprove of the Australian government spying on Indonesia. There are a number of issues in Indonesia that impact on Australia directly including: government stability, fundamentalist Islam, asylum seekers, human rights abuses (e.g Aceh, East Timor and West Papua). Having inside knowledge of the government's thoughts could prevent misteps and assist Australia in working with Indonesia using soft power.
History (Balibo Five, live cattle exports, suggests that Australia is not as skilled as we would like.
There are not enough sheep in Tasmania for there to be a synergy with New Zealand.
In a democracy the elected member of the government are expandable. We can LITERALLY, replace them over night. They do no need extra 'security'. This is the strength of democracy; for as long as there are citizens we can find, among ourselves, a new leader to replace the previous one.
I'd suggest it is wise to provide elected members with an appropriate income and protection because theoretically it should reduce the ability of others to corrupt them. However I use the word theoretically because in many countries the influencers have become very sophisticated at manipulation.
So, that's about $13 / GB. AT&T (ie. the global rip off artist of the century) basically charges $10 / GB to inividuals.
Cheap by Australian standards. Telstra charge $25 for 1GB, with excess data at 10c/MB or $40 with no excess data charges. You can pay $95 for 15GB with same excess data 10c/MB excess data charge. The prepaid option is even worse $20 for 250MB up to $180 for 12GB.
amaysim's $9.90 for 1GB or $29.90 for 4GB is about as cheap as it gets in Australia.
Speaking on behalf of the rest of the world, we are very thankful that the USA has timezones. I'm too scared to think what Windows would be like if it was written to support a single timezone.
Remember when you talk about the poor in the states, you're talking about an ever growing % of your population. People aren't getting dumber, so something must be happening...
Fetal alcohol syndrome could actually mean people are getting dumber. Secondly, looking at the current primary school kids in government schools from less socially well off areas, there is cause for concern that the education system is failing kids. Although having said that I'm not convinced that it is the education system, but more likely parents.
I live comfortably on about $500-700 per month in the Phoenix area.
Newstart (Unemployment) benefits are $501 fortnight in Australia for a single, no children. On top of that is rent assitance and medicare which provides (almost) free healthcare.
There are a few places where the potential reward for investment make sense. Most high security environments (e.g. military, foreign embassies, etc) use separate networks to maintain security. Data is transferred from less classified networks to more classified networks via external media frequently, but not the other way. Standard practice is for two (or more) computers to exist on a person's desk with access to networks with a different level of classification. That person may be able to transfer files using a USB key. One of those is most likely a laptop that connects to external networks and which might be possible to compromise, particularly with a targetted attack. If the primary purpose is extraction of data, then a very sensitive listener could be sufficient.
I suspect that if this is at all possible, NSA (and other organisations) would be prepared to spend big on research because jumping an air gap could have huge rewards. It wouldn't surprise me that if this wasn't available now, there would be people from various organisations would have been researching since the story broke.
I think the easiest way to prove / disprove this would be to check the security policies of various organisations. If there are indications in the policies of measures to prevent this kind of attack (e.g. internal speakers removed, headphones only), then I think some credence should be given to the claims.
I've found WinXP running in a VM the sanest way to connect to the VPNs of various clients that I work with. Many VPN clients attempt to take over the entire network stack and direct all your traffic through their VPN which creates havoc with accessing company servers.
With WinXP I can clone a VM for different clients. I tried this with Windows7 and ran into activiation nightmares. Possibly not strictly legal, but I refuse to fork out cash just because different VPN clients won't play nicely with each other on the same instance.
One way of doing this is simply having a unit of, perhaps, 1Mbps, with offerings based on multiples of that. Grandma might have a 1Mbps service for her occasional e-mail and web-browsing, plus the occasional software update; the guy who regularly syncs with every open source repository might pay for a 10Mbps service (which, in the middle of the night, gets 200Mbps).
The problem with this is that once a week, Grandma has a video conference with the grandkids for half an hour. The experience would be better if Grandma had a 100Mbps connection, but Grandma is unlikely to justify the extra expense just for that short call.
A 1Gbps connection is capable of 324TB a month. For a residential user that is a huge amount of data, yet because it is available some customers will download torrents to /dev/null simply because they can.
Quotas are a much more reasonable approach than speed tiers and likelier to lead to faster speeds because ISPs will want you to be able to download more data so they can charge you more. If you happen to blow through your quota in the first day, then you are capped to 128Kbps for the rest of the month and learn for next month or purchase additional quota. Excess usage charges should be banned because of potential bill shock.
Use a fair allocation scheme - as total bandwidth becomes saturated, drop the max rate down until it's no longer saturated.
This was tried in Australia by Internode and called the FlatRate plan. I've provided details in another post. In short it failed because Grandma opts for the low quota plan because it is cheaper, resulting in only heavy users being on the FlatRate plan. This made it unsustainable compared to fixed quota tiers because users preferred the certainty of having 100GB, 300GB, etc a month.
Many years ago in Australia, a well respected ISP Internode introduced flatrate plans, which prioritised traffic based on usage in the last 30 days. This Whirlpool interview with Simon Hackett about the new flatrate plans. The plans failed as explained in this End of flatrate announcement. The key point from Simon's post is that flatrate wasn't able to attract sufficient low and medium users to balance the leechers. There is a thread to discuss Are Flatrate plans viable under NBN?.
The difference between the Australian & USA market is that we've pretty much always had quotas. Customers choose the quota they want (30GB through to 1TB). Quotas are implemented as full speed until you reach your quota and the speed is capped to 256Kbps or 128Kbps for the rest of the month. Some RSPs allow you to buy additional data blocks. Some ISPs also offer extra downloads during off peak times (midnight to 8am) which are good for scheduling downloads.
The fact is that ISPs run networks with contention and in cheaper ISPs that leads to congestion in peak hours. There is not dedicated bandwidth between your PC and the server you want to connect with. Quotas are a reasonable way for ISPs to manage network traffic and make it cheaper to offer faster speeds. Bandwidth is a shared resource, which some people over exploit impacting on others. This is referred to as the Tragedy of the commons.
Would you prefer 8Mbps with no quota or 100Mbps with a 1TB quota?
Even without that, Linux plays very nicely with Android phones. You can set up all sorts of integration between them.
I think this point would have more weight if you added some examples. Two weeks ago I purchased my first android phone. I haven't had time to play with it much, but I'd like to know answers to the following questions.
Is there a recipies site?