I knew enough about Tesla cars, or so I thought. I always figured they were impractical for me because their price puts them at a sole-car position for a person, and for long trips there was nothing that could be done about not being able to reach places > 300 miles away.
The scandal actually gave me a second or third look at them and let me see that the supercharger network is coming along. I also thought that the supercharger network was dumb, reasoning that I wouldn't want to wait 50 minutes to recharge my car in the middle of a trip. The article made me rethink that as well. On a drive of >300 miles I almost always stop somewhere for lunch. Basically the cars range just enforces a break every few hundred miles.. not that bad a thing.
There are still problems unspoken by this article. What if multiple cars are ahead of you and it takes 2 hours to charge? You can't really plan those delays into a trip, not a business one at least.
I'm still a big fan of the Chevy Volt for being 100% electric, with the backup gas engine if needed. And it doesn't look completely ridiculous like the nissan leaf, nor does it require new infrastructure like the Tesla.
They can keep doing this all day...
on
The Return of CISPA
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· Score: 3, Interesting
There is no way to kill a bill with prejudice. No way to say "NO, and don't ever bring this up again!"
So the same congressman who was there last year and the year before keeps bringing up the same bill over and over again until it passes. It doesn't cost them anything to introduce a failed bit of legislation. If anything, it costs the less the second time around because they didn't have to retype it.
Everyone already acknowledges that nobody reads these things, they're hundreds of pages of nonsense most of the time, and everyone knows there is some pork thrown in there somewhere to fund someones pet project, since that's the only way they'll vote for it.
Eventually, the public gets tired of standing up for their rights and just goes home. They'll wear down the protestors enough to the point where they won't notice or care that it's been backdoored into the "stop children's recitals act" of 2014.
'Let me elaborate on that for a second. When I say “bring down” an ethernet controller I mean BRING DOWN an ethernet controller.'
This statement is worse than useless, it's a waste of space and a waste of your time to read it (I'm sorry I quoted it). The next sentence is okay but then they go back to 'Literally the link lights on the switch and interface would go out. It was dead.'
Literally, this is a waste of the word literally. And it being dead was implied by everything stated above. The rest is informative but still in a conversational style that makes it hard to read, and it's lacking in details such as:
What model of Ethernet controller was tested. What Firmware version are they using? Has the problem been reported to Intel?
We beat Comcast to the punch by about a year. I'm happy that they turned it on and can afford to support it, but 90% of the customers you have are dumb and don't care why it doesn't work from your ISP, they just care that it works at Starbucks and doesn't work at their house.
Being a huge monopoly has an advantage when it comes to telling customers to pack it up when they have DNS issues. I too am a comcast customer and I run my own resolver (for flexibility, not because they implemented DNSSEC)
All the domains that didn't work at the time were government sites. Usually obscure subdomains that only individual customers needed access to, so hounding random government agency to fix their problems didn't really help the rest of your customers. Also, contact with random government agency admin, which isn't easy to begin with, might be impossible if their admin contact has an MX within the broken DNSSEC domain (or we're forced to use non-DNSSEC enabled resolvers for our own email servers to contact them)
It broke access to several DNSSEC enabled websites that were misconfigured. After a few months of support problems where we suggested the websites fix their issues and they ignored it, it was requested by management that we turn it off.
It's a very bad design as it stands now. It's unable to return any error but NX Domain for DNSSEC errors for reasons of backword compatibility, which is stupid since you need a DNSSEC enabled resolver to make the request.
It also has an incredibly steep learning curve that even experienced public key administrators face problems with.
In a world not controlled by giant oligarchy phone companies you can "buy" a car from a dealership, take it home and paint it purple.
You can do the same to your house because even though you owe 99% of it's value to the bank it belongs to you.
For some reason, the same thing isn't true for a $500 phone. Why can't I buy a phone from T-mobile with a 2 year contract, take it home and immediately switch it to AT&T but continue paying T-mobile for the phone for 2 years?
My favorite thing about autocomplete is all the times I've typed something in the box I didn't mean to, or pasted something when the wrong thing was in my paste buffer. The autocomplete logs have got to be a goldmine of private individual data, and confidential corporate data.
Thanks for releasing something to the world that someone else might have a use for. Why does your service, which completely defines your company, and uses Linux heavily in it's backend, consider Linux users to be pirates and not allow them to use your product?
I "roll" with other services, like youtube, or hulu, or amazon which allow users to stream to Linux platforms.
I self censor my emails all the time. You wouldn't believe how many long diatribes I've thrown away. How many heart felt impassioned speeches I've given up on as offensive or too harsh. I guess in some ways it makes the harsh emails I do send that much more potent. The point I'm trying to make is that it must take a special kind of person to stand up in front of more than 100,000 people and say "you're a moron, shut up!"
He either realizes that this would cause a big fallout where his statement would be examined in detail by everyone on the mailing list + everyone on slashdot and a few other communities and just doesn't care; or he somehow hits the send button without ever realizing the consequences.
I think it's the former, and despite his outburst he's still managed to steer the Linux community through 20 years of massive evolutionary changes in computing. It seems that even with armchair analysts saying he could get the job done without yelling, maybe should attempt the same thing, building a peaceful community of kernel hackers with no tyrant at the top and figure out a way to measure productivity, code quality and other metrics.
So build a full featured smart pad that has the same wipe capability and wipe them before tests. Possibly automatically through the local network the devices are all required to talk to if they're allowed in the classroom. (With the ability to restore from a network save of course, so the student doesn't loose whatever he saved on it)
Deliberately gimping a product this badly just means the student won't learn valuable skills with it. I've forgotten everything I ever learned about programming TI calculators because once I was out of school I never used one again... but when you think about it, computers are almost universally available and all of that functionality is just a nicely designed web-interface away from everyone. You could even restrict it in a student environment. That would mean that the skills you learned in school carried over to a real world practical use.
All of that is important because in the LONG run, if you're capable of exploiting a computer to get A's in calculus you probably understood the material anyway. The only time this isn't the case is sharing answers, which should still be detectable.
In anything beyond basic math (outside of school) it's assumed you will either estimate* or you'll use a computer to verify your accuracy.
It bothers me to see things not changing with the times just because. I do welcome mostly staying conservative with child education because it's hard to determine if it's safe to change things that can influence a child's growth, but not staying in touch with current technology seems like a miss-step even if it is ultra-conservative.
* I don't think estimation is taught very well in schools. Sure, you get a brief discussion of how it works and a day or two of homework on it, but it's not made clear when it's useful and when it's acceptable to use it. You don't really find out until college that it's okay to ballpark things with rounded numbers as long as you get the formulas right, and that's an important skill for Grocery shopping, Astronomy, most Engineering disciplines and probably lots of other things.
There is always a new scheme. They can reincorporate in a new country, they could even move the jobs to new countries and stop being US companies completely if you make the tax law draconian enough. The government believes this threat so they cater to corporations to make their tax burdens easier.
Senators negotiate for corporations to come to states and give them incentives. Some states have better tax laws than others so even in the US you get some shell companies that are incorporated in one place but have all their employees in another. Then you get factories built on the basis of job creation so you can put that on your ticket when running for reelection. "Build a factory in Texas that will employ 500 people and we'll give you 10 years of no taxes on it."
Those are the kind of games they play. So we have manufacturing happening in places that isn't needed, or costs more than in other markets but the corporation got something out of it, and they'll always game that number.. "poor profits means we had to layoff 100 of those people."
The government never exercises the 'stick' part of the carrot and stick agreement. Up until the bankruptcy and closing of lots of banks and car manufacturers, their opinion was always that if you meddle in the corporations affairs they might just leave. And they aren't a person, you can't stop them from doing something that you don't like. You can't even stop them from importing goods because "tariffs are evil and damage our relations with other countries" or whatever excuse we have for free trade.
The global economic problem that's been happening for a while is that people who don't care about standards of living will make shoes for less money than people who do. And the total cost to make and ship shoes, or any commodity, is artificially low due to not considering the environmental effects of burning the nastiest fuels in the biggest container ships we can build.
And there is simply no way you can ask a corporation to care about the environment if it affects their bottom dollar. Dollars are the only thing to a corporation. If it's possible to make more money by whipping people, making toxic chemicals in India, or any other scheme. If all the hassle it causes is bad PR, if you can simply change your name through the buying and selling of competitors several times (while keeping the same top management) to shed the bad press, then what can we do to stop you?
DNSSEC specifically does not stop MITM attacks. It relies on you trusting your recursive DNS server, which you can't do if you are on an untrusted network.
It's not in the protocol to do so, but you can download the root signing key and verify you're talking to a legitimate DNS server, but what it the protocol is providing is trust between a recursive DNS server and a remote authoritative DNS server. The user -> dns server piece is not addressed.
I asked for some comments from technical people regarding these problems and what you're supposed to be doing if you're surfing at Starbucks and using their DNS server (or the guy next to you who's spoofing a DNS server), but I didn't get a response. I was asking the bind guys and some security lists so I think the message might have been received and correctly understood but maybe they didn't have time to acknowledge or answer it.
Aside from a punchdown tool for terminating cables to racks, I think you would do well with electricians tools. Good scissors, wire strippers, electrical tape, a small and large pair of dykes, cable toner and possibly electrical toner (handy even if you don't think you'll be doing electrical work yourself because sometimes you may need to track down what breaker an outlet is on because it's either improperly labelled, or unlabelled). A non-contact thermometer might be good too for measuring exhaust temperatures of servers.
Some of these tools are obviously handy if you'll be doing any low voltage DC stuff, but most of them are multi-purpose and you may find yourself using one because it's handy even if it's not quite the right tool. Even if none of this stuff seems like things you'll want or need, your objective should be to find things you'll use all the time for the main tools, and things that have multiple uses so you keep getting value for them.
Stop letting apps control install/uninstall. Start showing dependency chains so you can reasonably uninstall a program without breaking other things.
Linux systems solved this problem and became the easiest systems to maintain. That is why they're still around and Solaris is owned by Oracle. The Mac had a good idea 20 years ago with their mostly resource/data forks and keeping everything in one file. They partially abandoned that with MacOSX and you ended up with guts that were on top of a UNIX fs with a GUI designed to hide that from you. Consequently, the apps all had access to drop their crap wherever they felt like and then you've got the same problem windows has.. only worse
because you need to hide metadata on portable and shared media so you dump.Trashes files everywhere along with 17 other interestingly named files. They also started using filename.extension as a format for sharing files, so you get troublesome results with applications that choose to creatively crap on your filesystem.
The answer is for commercial companies to stop allowing apps to run an executable to uninstall themselves. That has to be the dumbest idea possible from every approachable angle. Asking malware/adware/crapware if it wants to uninstall and if it would be so kind as to do so gracefully and without breaking anything, or leaving any files behind, or redirecting you to a website asking you why.
If you just roll with the punches you'll be fine. Allow people to complain on social media sites that your product is bad. Manage the image of your product from the download pages. Get complete control over the download experience. Take your product off shit sites that put sixteen "download here" buttons that lead to adware. Spend an afternoon sending notices to all the sites out there that they are hosting your product improperly. Centralize your downloads to github or sourceforge or someone else who's exceedly friendly to open source developers.
Note though: Still provide and allow it to be packaged by distributions since it's open source, but only with proper documentation and attribution. I'm thinking the way opennms manages their image would be good for you.
And here's the deal: Anyone who gets on twitter and says "http://yourproductnamehere.com is shit because they don't support it" is a free advertisement for your site. Regardless of the negative connotations that gives someone a chance to check out your software that they've never heard of before and see what their friend is so riled up about.
There have been several times when a friend of mine has told me about a product, good or bad, that I've either decided to adopt or not based on my own needs rather than the conversation we had. There are also people who will twit that your product is good and your free support online community should give you a base of loyal users who love you, even if only some of them can pay.
Rather than immediately telling them they need to pay money when they call, ask them if they have a support account. If they say no then politely direct them to online forums, IRC, or a mailing list. Have a pricing structure webpage they can look at so they can decide at any time if their needs are big enough to justify paying for support.
Usually, the customers you want to pay are ones that want special features or who need 24/7 break-fix help in emergencies. They're the ones who are amicable to monthly or yearly payments and are a lesser day-to-day burden on your support team.
Finally, make your support team part of your development and sales teams. Empower your employees to actually get things done rather than being the person who just shuffles calls. Unless you have so many basic questions you think you could get by with a tiered call center.
Remember when it was discovered that the plugins you have installed in your browser, and which browser you were using could almost identify who you were? That's how I felt as I answered questions on the site and saw the number of matches dwindle. I'm not even an AU resident, I just answered truthfully up until it asked for the city and it had narrowed down to ~20000 matches for "people like me."
If you assume that one of those 20000 is me, and that I live in a small town then the number might get even closer to just 1. And once you factor in any other data that might correlate behind the scenes it's not hard to figure out who's who.
Remember the anonymous netflix data that they figured out how to de-anonymize? Same deal. If you're an AU resident, the data is there to uniquely identify you, they just have made a bet with the internet that people won't be able to do so.
I don't think it's bad for what it does, but the inability to rollback changes or even to know what's been changed is a serious oversight. There are third party tools that fix this (Google search for active directory change control), but for a large scale environment you shouldn't have to rely on third parties to make a tool usable.
Contrast this to a UNIX based ldap server (openldap) where the entire directory can be saved and reloaded as a text file over and over again.
AD also has the tendency to bury lots of information behind properties windows that have 30 or so tabs. Even if you look at all of those you'll still miss disconnected pieces like group policies or if an AD account has an exchange account.
I don't think "replace AD with Samba" is a good idea though. If you're going to be using lots of Windows systems then you're better off managing them with the tools provided by the vendor.
As more people move to using tablets and other mobile devices, mainly due to both cost and convenience, content that can't be accessed from them is going to become less and less wanted or usefull.
I already had to download an unofficial version of 32bit flash because the 64bit version they pushed me crashed browsers immediately. I left it broken for at least 2 weeks, uninstalled it for at least 2 weeks and searched for alternatives (without h264 support, you still really need flash to view youtube), finally broke down and reinstalled the old version I downloaded from a sketchy "oldversions" website.
My point being it's been broken at least a month and they know about it. If they can't fix it then they might as well shut it down, and this is the WINDOWS version.. the only one they're still putting out updates for.. they pretty much gave up on linux, gave up completely on mobile, so what direction are they planning on taking?
Exactly. Rockstar requiring "social club" for Max Payne 3 (was optional for GTAIV). Ubisoft requiring Uplay for Anno 2070 (Steam sale... wish Steam would let you return unplayed games because I had very little interest in signing up for Uplay, even before finding out it was a backdoor)
In general I do not want to put up with this kind of thing. I started buying games on Steam because they made it easy and it felt good and right to be paying publishers for the games I liked playing. It's now becoming a shit show just like it was buying retail, only slightly more convenient because I can buy online.
Publishers need to remember that pirates never ask you to sign in and don't need your email address to market to.
Steam just made me update and click through the agreement. I figure it isn't valid in court considering the only way to continue playing the games you purchased was to agree to new terms, but it's still bullshit we have to wait until someone tests the law.
It doesn't matter if it actually benefits the consumer. The companies doing this are playing dirty by limiting the users rights to use the legal system. They haven't given us a choice in the matter, they've decided that whats in their best interest is also in ours. I find that hard to believe.
I've boycotted Sony for doing the same thing with the PS3, after shenanigans before of removing Linux from the PS3 and taking other things away from the customer. So what am I supposed to do in this case?
The counter to this is that an overly broad education is also worthless. It's not just that you don't use some of those things you learned, it's that you'll forget them given enough time. Your brain makes room mostly for the things you use each day.
Now, going too far down that path means people would be extremely dull to be around, all of them specialists in exactly one thing or a couple of things, but it is important to weigh things out every 10 years or so and decide if too much emphasis was put on something. Mathematics is a very broad subject with lots of things to talk about and most of it is different facets of the same animal. Maybe it'll be decided that now that everyone has access to graphing calculators, geometry is a much more intuitive way to solve some of the problems we normally use algebra for. Intuitive being relative according to how you learn, but likely geometry/algebra/calculus should all be melded into one discipline at lower levels and people should be taught according to what makes more sense to them, if they're visual, audable learners, etc.
They can't do something like that now because classes have to be accessible to all 30 students no matter their IQ or learning type. Computer aided teaching could identify how someone learns and let them explore the concepts without worrying about what disciplines they come from.
The same applies to Biology, Chemistry and Physics, they all work with each other and if you explore any particular topic saying "and what happens after that.." you get to the boundries between each field. Arguably, the student should be allowed to go straight past that boundry and keep exploring the topic rather than saying "that next part is physics."
It's pointless to begin with, the threading system is so awful you'll need to fully quote another user for anyone to know what you're talking about, and this is years after they had a chance to fix it. Other than the annoying notification that you can't watch adult videos without being signed in, I can't imagine why staying signed into youtube would be useful, but then again I haven't uploaded any videos either so I guess I may have missed the entire point.
A computer could break this after 2 viewings, so just having people with a camera near you while you're logging in is a security risk.
Additionally, if given unlimited attempts, a human would naturally get better at the 30 character sequence after a few playthroughs since it would be repeated. Their concience mind might even recognize it as familar even if you didn't.
As an aside, their product was horribly cumbersome to use. The scroll wheel thing was a failure and any setting you had to find was buried deep under sometimes arbitrary submenus. It's bad when your techie people can't even figure out how to get the thing working. It leads even corporate users to start dropping the platform as soon as something comes along that does what they need and is easy to use (iPhone)
Remember for years corporations were refusing to allow iPhones because they didn't support all the BES features like remote management and wipe, but they were giving exceptions to their executives. That is a BAD sign. When none of your customers want your product but feel forced into it, it's time to do something about that or eventually they'll decide whatever is holding them to it isn't worth the pain.
The next or next-next generation is who is going to determine what new keyboard wins out. As an old-school mouse fps player I first derided and now am simply amazed people can play fps with any accuracy on joystick, but it makes sense that with enough precision and enough training it would work for people.
The same with texting, I never got the number pad type "type with both thumbs" style, but kids caught on and learned all the key combinations and it got big, then they had contests to see how fast people could text on them. Then they rolled out smartphones and everyone went back to qwerty soft keyboards but still the idea was there that there was a new means of input.
I don't think there will be an invented "better input method' though. Usually this stuff catches on by accident, or by repeated incremental refinements until it's naturally integrated into peoples lives. Using the joystick example, imagine someone trying to play an FPS with an atari or NES controller. While the phone layout hasn't changed for ages, I can't really see people texting on the old analog cellphones from the 80's and 90's, the buttons were made not for tactile feedback but to be reliable and keep the dirt out, you would quickly get tired and be frustrated at how hard the button had to be pressed and the accuracy.
Slashdot Mirror
I knew enough about Tesla cars, or so I thought. I always figured they were impractical for me because their price puts them at a sole-car position for a person, and for long trips there was nothing that could be done about not being able to reach places > 300 miles away.
The scandal actually gave me a second or third look at them and let me see that the supercharger network is coming along. I also thought that the supercharger network was dumb, reasoning that I wouldn't want to wait 50 minutes to recharge my car in the middle of a trip. The article made me rethink that as well. On a drive of >300 miles I almost always stop somewhere for lunch. Basically the cars range just enforces a break every few hundred miles.. not that bad a thing.
There are still problems unspoken by this article. What if multiple cars are ahead of you and it takes 2 hours to charge? You can't really plan those delays into a trip, not a business one at least.
I'm still a big fan of the Chevy Volt for being 100% electric, with the backup gas engine if needed. And it doesn't look completely ridiculous like the nissan leaf, nor does it require new infrastructure like the Tesla.
There is no way to kill a bill with prejudice. No way to say "NO, and don't ever bring this up again!"
So the same congressman who was there last year and the year before keeps bringing up the same bill over and over again until it passes. It doesn't cost them anything to introduce a failed bit of legislation. If anything, it costs the less the second time around because they didn't have to retype it.
Everyone already acknowledges that nobody reads these things, they're hundreds of pages of nonsense most of the time, and everyone knows there is some pork thrown in there somewhere to fund someones pet project, since that's the only way they'll vote for it.
Eventually, the public gets tired of standing up for their rights and just goes home. They'll wear down the protestors enough to the point where they won't notice or care that it's been backdoored into the "stop children's recitals act" of 2014.
It's pretty bad even by slashdot standards:
'Let me elaborate on that for a second. When I say “bring down” an ethernet controller I mean BRING DOWN an ethernet controller.'
This statement is worse than useless, it's a waste of space and a waste of your time to read it (I'm sorry I quoted it). The next sentence is okay but then they go back to 'Literally the link lights on the switch and interface would go out. It was dead.'
Literally, this is a waste of the word literally. And it being dead was implied by everything stated above. The rest is informative but still in a conversational style that makes it hard to read, and it's lacking in details such as:
What model of Ethernet controller was tested. What Firmware version are they using? Has the problem been reported to Intel?
We beat Comcast to the punch by about a year. I'm happy that they turned it on and can afford to support it, but 90% of the customers you have are dumb and don't care why it doesn't work from your ISP, they just care that it works at Starbucks and doesn't work at their house.
Being a huge monopoly has an advantage when it comes to telling customers to pack it up when they have DNS issues. I too am a comcast customer and I run my own resolver (for flexibility, not because they implemented DNSSEC)
All the domains that didn't work at the time were government sites. Usually obscure subdomains that only individual customers needed access to, so hounding random government agency to fix their problems didn't really help the rest of your customers. Also, contact with random government agency admin, which isn't easy to begin with, might be impossible if their admin contact has an MX within the broken DNSSEC domain (or we're forced to use non-DNSSEC enabled resolvers for our own email servers to contact them)
It broke access to several DNSSEC enabled websites that were misconfigured. After a few months of support problems where we suggested the websites fix their issues and they ignored it, it was requested by management that we turn it off.
It's a very bad design as it stands now. It's unable to return any error but NX Domain for DNSSEC errors for reasons of backword compatibility, which is stupid since you need a DNSSEC enabled resolver to make the request.
It also has an incredibly steep learning curve that even experienced public key administrators face problems with.
In a world not controlled by giant oligarchy phone companies you can "buy" a car from a dealership, take it home and paint it purple.
You can do the same to your house because even though you owe 99% of it's value to the bank it belongs to you.
For some reason, the same thing isn't true for a $500 phone. Why can't I buy a phone from T-mobile with a 2 year contract, take it home and immediately switch it to AT&T but continue paying T-mobile for the phone for 2 years?
My favorite thing about autocomplete is all the times I've typed something in the box I didn't mean to, or pasted something when the wrong thing was in my paste buffer. The autocomplete logs have got to be a goldmine of private individual data, and confidential corporate data.
Thanks for releasing something to the world that someone else might have a use for. Why does your service, which completely defines your company, and uses Linux heavily in it's backend, consider Linux users to be pirates and not allow them to use your product?
I "roll" with other services, like youtube, or hulu, or amazon which allow users to stream to Linux platforms.
I self censor my emails all the time. You wouldn't believe how many long diatribes I've thrown away. How many heart felt impassioned speeches I've given up on as offensive or too harsh. I guess in some ways it makes the harsh emails I do send that much more potent. The point I'm trying to make is that it must take a special kind of person to stand up in front of more than 100,000 people and say "you're a moron, shut up!"
He either realizes that this would cause a big fallout where his statement would be examined in detail by everyone on the mailing list + everyone on slashdot and a few other communities and just doesn't care; or he somehow hits the send button without ever realizing the consequences.
I think it's the former, and despite his outburst he's still managed to steer the Linux community through 20 years of massive evolutionary changes in computing. It seems that even with armchair analysts saying he could get the job done without yelling, maybe should attempt the same thing, building a peaceful community of kernel hackers with no tyrant at the top and figure out a way to measure productivity, code quality and other metrics.
So build a full featured smart pad that has the same wipe capability and wipe them before tests. Possibly automatically through the local network the devices are all required to talk to if they're allowed in the classroom. (With the ability to restore from a network save of course, so the student doesn't loose whatever he saved on it)
Deliberately gimping a product this badly just means the student won't learn valuable skills with it. I've forgotten everything I ever learned about programming TI calculators because once I was out of school I never used one again... but when you think about it, computers are almost universally available and all of that functionality is just a nicely designed web-interface away from everyone. You could even restrict it in a student environment. That would mean that the skills you learned in school carried over to a real world practical use.
All of that is important because in the LONG run, if you're capable of exploiting a computer to get A's in calculus you probably understood the material anyway. The only time this isn't the case is sharing answers, which should still be detectable.
In anything beyond basic math (outside of school) it's assumed you will either estimate* or you'll use a computer to verify your accuracy.
It bothers me to see things not changing with the times just because. I do welcome mostly staying conservative with child education because it's hard to determine if it's safe to change things that can influence a child's growth, but not staying in touch with current technology seems like a miss-step even if it is ultra-conservative.
* I don't think estimation is taught very well in schools. Sure, you get a brief discussion of how it works and a day or two of homework on it, but it's not made clear when it's useful and when it's acceptable to use it. You don't really find out until college that it's okay to ballpark things with rounded numbers as long as you get the formulas right, and that's an important skill for Grocery shopping, Astronomy, most Engineering disciplines and probably lots of other things.
There is always a new scheme. They can reincorporate in a new country, they could even move the jobs to new countries and stop being US companies completely if you make the tax law draconian enough. The government believes this threat so they cater to corporations to make their tax burdens easier.
Senators negotiate for corporations to come to states and give them incentives. Some states have better tax laws than others so even in the US you get some shell companies that are incorporated in one place but have all their employees in another. Then you get factories built on the basis of job creation so you can put that on your ticket when running for reelection.
"Build a factory in Texas that will employ 500 people and we'll give you 10 years of no taxes on it."
Those are the kind of games they play. So we have manufacturing happening in places that isn't needed, or costs more than in other markets but the corporation got something out of it, and they'll always game that number.. "poor profits means we had to layoff 100 of those people."
The government never exercises the 'stick' part of the carrot and stick agreement. Up until the bankruptcy and closing of lots of banks and car manufacturers, their opinion was always that if you meddle in the corporations affairs they might just leave. And they aren't a person, you can't stop them from doing something that you don't like. You can't even stop them from importing goods because "tariffs are evil and damage our relations with other countries" or whatever excuse we have for free trade.
The global economic problem that's been happening for a while is that people who don't care about standards of living will make shoes for less money than people who do. And the total cost to make and ship shoes, or any commodity, is artificially low due to not considering the environmental effects of burning the nastiest fuels in the biggest container ships we can build.
And there is simply no way you can ask a corporation to care about the environment if it affects their bottom dollar. Dollars are the only thing to a corporation. If it's possible to make more money by whipping people, making toxic chemicals in India, or any other scheme. If all the hassle it causes is bad PR, if you can simply change your name through the buying and selling of competitors several times (while keeping the same top management) to shed the bad press, then what can we do to stop you?
DNSSEC specifically does not stop MITM attacks. It relies on you trusting your recursive DNS server, which you can't do if you are on an untrusted network.
It's not in the protocol to do so, but you can download the root signing key and verify you're talking to a legitimate DNS server, but what it the protocol is providing is trust between a recursive DNS server and a remote authoritative DNS server. The user -> dns server piece is not addressed.
I asked for some comments from technical people regarding these problems and what you're supposed to be doing if you're surfing at Starbucks and using their DNS server (or the guy next to you who's spoofing a DNS server), but I didn't get a response. I was asking the bind guys and some security lists so I think the message might have been received and correctly understood but maybe they didn't have time to acknowledge or answer it.
Aside from a punchdown tool for terminating cables to racks, I think you would do well with electricians tools. Good scissors, wire strippers, electrical tape, a small and large pair of dykes, cable toner and possibly electrical toner (handy even if you don't think you'll be doing electrical work yourself because sometimes you may need to track down what breaker an outlet is on because it's either improperly labelled, or unlabelled). A non-contact thermometer might be good too for measuring exhaust temperatures of servers.
Some of these tools are obviously handy if you'll be doing any low voltage DC stuff, but most of them are multi-purpose and you may find yourself using one because it's handy even if it's not quite the right tool. Even if none of this stuff seems like things you'll want or need, your objective should be to find things you'll use all the time for the main tools, and things that have multiple uses so you keep getting value for them.
Stop letting apps control install/uninstall. Start showing dependency chains so you can reasonably uninstall a program without breaking other things.
Linux systems solved this problem and became the easiest systems to maintain. That is why they're still around and Solaris is owned by Oracle. The Mac had a good idea 20 years ago with their mostly resource/data forks and keeping everything in one file. They partially abandoned that with MacOSX and you ended up with guts that were on top of a UNIX fs with a GUI designed to hide that from you. Consequently, the apps all had access to drop their crap wherever they felt like and then you've got the same problem windows has.. only worse
because you need to hide metadata on portable and shared media so you dump .Trashes files everywhere along with 17 other interestingly named files. They also started using filename.extension as a format for sharing files, so you get troublesome results with applications that choose to creatively crap on your filesystem.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2001/08/metadata/7/
The answer is for commercial companies to stop allowing apps to run an executable to uninstall themselves. That has to be the dumbest idea possible from every approachable angle. Asking malware/adware/crapware if it wants to uninstall and if it would be so kind as to do so gracefully and without breaking anything, or leaving any files behind, or redirecting you to a website asking you why.
If you just roll with the punches you'll be fine. Allow people to complain on social media sites that your product is bad. Manage the image of your product from the download pages. Get complete control over the download experience. Take your product off shit sites that put sixteen "download here" buttons that lead to adware. Spend an afternoon sending notices to all the sites out there that they are hosting your product improperly. Centralize your downloads to github or sourceforge or someone else who's exceedly friendly to open source developers.
Note though: Still provide and allow it to be packaged by distributions since it's open source, but only with proper documentation and attribution. I'm thinking the way opennms manages their image would be good for you.
And here's the deal: Anyone who gets on twitter and says "http://yourproductnamehere.com is shit because they don't support it" is a free advertisement for your site. Regardless of the negative connotations that gives someone a chance to check out your software that they've never heard of before and see what their friend is so riled up about.
There have been several times when a friend of mine has told me about a product, good or bad, that I've either decided to adopt or not based on my own needs rather than the conversation we had. There are also people who will twit that your product is good and your free support online community should give you a base of loyal users who love you, even if only some of them can pay.
Rather than immediately telling them they need to pay money when they call, ask them if they have a support account. If they say no then politely direct them to online forums, IRC, or a mailing list. Have a pricing structure webpage they can look at so they can decide at any time if their needs are big enough to justify paying for support.
Usually, the customers you want to pay are ones that want special features or who need 24/7 break-fix help in emergencies. They're the ones who are amicable to monthly or yearly payments and are a lesser day-to-day burden on your support team.
Finally, make your support team part of your development and sales teams. Empower your employees to actually get things done rather than being the person who just shuffles calls. Unless you have so many basic questions you think you could get by with a tiered call center.
And don't outsource your support.
Remember when it was discovered that the plugins you have installed in your browser, and which browser you were using could almost identify who you were? That's how I felt as I answered questions on the site and saw the number of matches dwindle. I'm not even an AU resident, I just answered truthfully up until it asked for the city and it had narrowed down to ~20000 matches for "people like me."
If you assume that one of those 20000 is me, and that I live in a small town then the number might get even closer to just 1. And once you factor in any other data that might correlate behind the scenes it's not hard to figure out who's who.
Remember the anonymous netflix data that they figured out how to de-anonymize? Same deal. If you're an AU resident, the data is there to uniquely identify you, they just have made a bet with the internet that people won't be able to do so.
I don't think it's bad for what it does, but the inability to rollback changes or even to know what's been changed is a serious oversight. There are third party tools that fix this (Google search for active directory change control), but for a large scale environment you shouldn't have to rely on third parties to make a tool usable.
Contrast this to a UNIX based ldap server (openldap) where the entire directory can be saved and reloaded as a text file over and over again.
AD also has the tendency to bury lots of information behind properties windows that have 30 or so tabs. Even if you look at all of those you'll still miss disconnected pieces like group policies or if an AD account has an exchange account.
I don't think "replace AD with Samba" is a good idea though. If you're going to be using lots of Windows systems then you're better off managing them with the tools provided by the vendor.
As more people move to using tablets and other mobile devices, mainly due to both cost and convenience, content that can't be accessed from them is going to become less and less wanted or usefull.
I already had to download an unofficial version of 32bit flash because the 64bit version they pushed me crashed browsers immediately. I left it broken for at least 2 weeks, uninstalled it for at least 2 weeks and searched for alternatives (without h264 support, you still really need flash to view youtube), finally broke down and reinstalled the old version I downloaded from a sketchy "oldversions" website.
My point being it's been broken at least a month and they know about it. If they can't fix it then they might as well shut it down, and this is the WINDOWS version.. the only one they're still putting out updates for.. they pretty much gave up on linux, gave up completely on mobile, so what direction are they planning on taking?
Exactly. Rockstar requiring "social club" for Max Payne 3 (was optional for GTAIV). Ubisoft requiring Uplay for Anno 2070 (Steam sale... wish Steam would let you return unplayed games because I had very little interest in signing up for Uplay, even before finding out it was a backdoor)
In general I do not want to put up with this kind of thing. I started buying games on Steam because they made it easy and it felt good and right to be paying publishers for the games I liked playing. It's now becoming a shit show just like it was buying retail, only slightly more convenient because I can buy online.
Publishers need to remember that pirates never ask you to sign in and don't need your email address to market to.
Steam just made me update and click through the agreement. I figure it isn't valid in court considering the only way to continue playing the games you purchased was to agree to new terms, but it's still bullshit we have to wait until someone tests the law.
It doesn't matter if it actually benefits the consumer. The companies doing this are playing dirty by limiting the users rights to use the legal system. They haven't given us a choice in the matter, they've decided that whats in their best interest is also in ours. I find that hard to believe.
I've boycotted Sony for doing the same thing with the PS3, after shenanigans before of removing Linux from the PS3 and taking other things away from the customer. So what am I supposed to do in this case?
The counter to this is that an overly broad education is also worthless. It's not just that you don't use some of those things you learned, it's that you'll forget them given enough time. Your brain makes room mostly for the things you use each day.
Now, going too far down that path means people would be extremely dull to be around, all of them specialists in exactly one thing or a couple of things, but it is important to weigh things out every 10 years or so and decide if too much emphasis was put on something. Mathematics is a very broad subject with lots of things to talk about and most of it is different facets of the same animal. Maybe it'll be decided that now that everyone has access to graphing calculators, geometry is a much more intuitive way to solve some of the problems we normally use algebra for. Intuitive being relative according to how you learn, but likely geometry/algebra/calculus should all be melded into one discipline at lower levels and people should be taught according to what makes more sense to them, if they're visual, audable learners, etc.
They can't do something like that now because classes have to be accessible to all 30 students no matter their IQ or learning type. Computer aided teaching could identify how someone learns and let them explore the concepts without worrying about what disciplines they come from.
The same applies to Biology, Chemistry and Physics, they all work with each other and if you explore any particular topic saying "and what happens after that.." you get to the boundries between each field. Arguably, the student should be allowed to go straight past that boundry and keep exploring the topic rather than saying "that next part is physics."
It's pointless to begin with, the threading system is so awful you'll need to fully quote another user for anyone to know what you're talking about, and this is years after they had a chance to fix it. Other than the annoying notification that you can't watch adult videos without being signed in, I can't imagine why staying signed into youtube would be useful, but then again I haven't uploaded any videos either so I guess I may have missed the entire point.
A computer could break this after 2 viewings, so just having people with a camera near you while you're logging in is a security risk.
Additionally, if given unlimited attempts, a human would naturally get better at the 30 character sequence after a few playthroughs since it would be repeated. Their concience mind might even recognize it as familar even if you didn't.
As an aside, their product was horribly cumbersome to use. The scroll wheel thing was a failure and any setting you had to find was buried deep under sometimes arbitrary submenus. It's bad when your techie people can't even figure out how to get the thing working. It leads even corporate users to start dropping the platform as soon as something comes along that does what they need and is easy to use (iPhone)
Remember for years corporations were refusing to allow iPhones because they didn't support all the BES features like remote management and wipe, but they were giving exceptions to their executives. That is a BAD sign. When none of your customers want your product but feel forced into it, it's time to do something about that or eventually they'll decide whatever is holding them to it isn't worth the pain.
The next or next-next generation is who is going to determine what new keyboard wins out. As an old-school mouse fps player I first derided and now am simply amazed people can play fps with any accuracy on joystick, but it makes sense that with enough precision and enough training it would work for people.
The same with texting, I never got the number pad type "type with both thumbs" style, but kids caught on and learned all the key combinations and it got big, then they had contests to see how fast people could text on them. Then they rolled out smartphones and everyone went back to qwerty soft keyboards but still the idea was there that there was a new means of input.
I don't think there will be an invented "better input method' though. Usually this stuff catches on by accident, or by repeated incremental refinements until it's naturally integrated into peoples lives. Using the joystick example, imagine someone trying to play an FPS with an atari or NES controller. While the phone layout hasn't changed for ages, I can't really see people texting on the old analog cellphones from the 80's and 90's, the buttons were made not for tactile feedback but to be reliable and keep the dirt out, you would quickly get tired and be frustrated at how hard the button had to be pressed and the accuracy.