For example I work in a mixed environment, Windows and Linux desktops and servers. It is a research university so we do a lot of custom setup and deployments. Need a good system for all that, and for maintaining 50,000 user accounts and all that. We do it, but Linux takes a lot more faffing about. Our Linux admin spends a lot of time fighting with scripts, puppet, dependencies, etc to get systems working and deploying. It works, don't get me wrong, but it takes me a shitload less time to do it on Windows.
Well, our time costs money too. So if support takes a lot more staff time, then you need more staff and that costs more.
I think too many geeks who think Linux is just as easy have set it up on their home network. They have like 3 computers, all using local accounts, and everything is great. Ya well, try it in a large environment. Try good user, group, and policy management with the tools it has (we don't, we use AD for everything and have it auth against that). What you do at home isn't the same as what you do when you have thousands of systems.
Also having the right applications can be a big deal. Some things, you can get for Linux no problem. Some you can get, but they aren't up to par with the Windows variants and can make your workflow much slower. Others you just can't get. So that can make a big difference in the feasibility.
Like say video editing. Yes, technically you CAN do it in Linux. I'm sure given enough time, you could do anything you needed to, if nothing else by exporting the frames as images, hand editing, and reimporting. However it is way slower and much more difficult than on Windows or a Mac. The tools are just not very good. Free, but not very good. Ya well, that $500 for Sony Vegas and $150 for Windows doesn't matter much against the time you pay editors, cameramen, and so on. You don't need it to be much faster, workflow wise, to make that up and more.
It seriously amazes me how little thought many geeks give the "it's open so anyone can support it!" argument. Seriously? You think that anyone can just sit down, read the source of a complex project, and fix and maintain it? It is just that easy?
Of course not. You need not just a programmer, but a good team and they can't be idiots. Maintaining something as large as an OS is a big job. So if the primary developers aren't doing it any more, you have to hire someone else to do it. So what's that cost? You can't ignore that, pretend like it isn't a real business cost just like software licenses.
Also there's the overall cost of sticking with something really old. This bitching about XP upgrades is silly because, by and large, the systems that need the upgrade are extremely old (I'm an IT support guy by profession). So if you took the route of paying to maintain this extremely old software on extremely old hardware it could end up costing you a lot in the long run in terms of productivity, as well as support.
Heck we've seen this in large scale systems like mainframes. IBM will generally support a mainframe as long as you like... for a price. You get companies running shit so old it is exceedingly expensive for the maintenance contract, and it is inflexible and has trouble dealing with their current business needs because it was designed 30 years ago. An upgrade would be a much better use of resources.
We even have a situation like that at work. We have an old Netapp FAS that we are still paying support on. 250GB SATA drives, no upgrade path. The support contract is multiple thousands a year, and getting higher. Netapp is happy to take our money and keep ti running but it can't run the new OnTap, can't take larger disks, etc, etc. The right answer, the one we are doing soon (hopefully) is to replace it with a new unit, migrate the data, and stand it down. Ya it is a bit of work, but it will be cheaper AND better in the long run.
Maintenance, upgrades, lifecycles, these are things you deal with for anything, software included. If you really think it is a feasible idea to just maintain a version of Linux forever, you are kidding yourself.
Also if you are wondering what long term maintenance of Linux costs, check out RHEL sometime. See what a support contract for a heavily supported, stable, Linux runs you. Then consider that MS has the same lifecycle on their OSes.
Because you media types went and fucked it up as hard as you could. I am the sort of person who would like to buy a fair bit of Blu-ray movies. I don't mind movies on disc, I have a player, and I'm fussy about picture and sound quality. Blu-ray is noticeably better than streaming video on my system.
However, greed and stupidity have screwed it up. For one it is just too expensive. I'll see a new movie int he store and the Blu-ray version is $10 above the DVD version. No, I'm not paying you for the extra bits. It does not cost you more to make. I'm not going to go and drop $35 on the Blu-ray version of something.
Then there's the DRM. "That wouldn't affect you unless you are a pirate!" you say? Bullshit. So while my TV setup is nice, by far the highest def system in my house is my computer. It has a high end home theater speaker setup connected to it, and a professional monitor. So I wanted to watch one of my Blu-rays on it. It has a BD-RW, it has software, it has a GPU with the stupid "secure" drivers, and everything is HDCP compliant. So I fire it up and... no dice. See I mirror my video signal, one goes to the monitor for display, one goes to the soundcard to provide clock for the audio. That isn't allowed, even though every device is HDCP compliant.
It also means should I wish to watch on my laptop, I'd have to buy it a Blu-ray player and lug the discs with me, there's no ability to copy them over.
Is it any wonder I'm not more interested? I have a few Blu-ray discs, but not many, and I don't buy them often. I'm not paying an inflated price, and part of their interest, the extremely high quality, is dulled by the knowledge that they won't work on my highest end system.
Netflix may not look as good, but it is cheap, and it works on, well, everything I own practically.
A big problem in many departments seems to be they just don't understand new technology. They don't understand that these devices can be located easily, and that they can have companies do the locating and give them a result if they get a warrant. Also that it is often worth doing because they nail someone with a bunch of other stolen goods usually.
This kind of thing happened at the university I work at. One of our employees got his laptop stolen by what can only be described as extreme stupidity on his part. Laptop had Computrace so my boss called them and got the tracking going. They were able to locate it, it was still in the city and being used regularly. This was handed to the police... and nothing happened for a long time. There was back and forth with my boss, the university police, the city police, the general council, etc, etc. Finally they seemed to figure shit out, got a warrant, found the guy and busted him. They recovered a bunch of stolen goods.
Of course after that it took even longer to actually get the laptop back, since it had to sit in the evidence room while all that went on, but we did get it.
Really to me it seemed mostly like the police just didn't understand what was going on. They thought they were being asked to go on a wild goose chase or something and didn't understand that the case was being handed to them all wrapped with a bow.
Education isn't the whole pboelm, but I think it'd help a lot. If police forces understood:
1) What to do. As in what company do you call, what do you need (just a phone call, subpoena, warrant, etc), and what kind of information do you get.
2) That this kind of thing gives you all the probable cause you need.
3) That when you bust someone like this, you usually get to nail them for a bunch more stuff. They generally didn't just make one theft, so you get to recover a bunch more stolen goods, and often other crimes (drugs, etc) as well.
Then I think it might be more common. They get a call saying "My phone has been stolen," they open up their "Policel2recoverphones" guide and start asking the questions it says and then go from there.
Why the comparison to a still camera? Ya I know that it can shoot video, as basically all DSLRs can these days but that isn't what it is made to not, isn't what it is best at. Why not compare it to a 1080p video camera? A Panasonic X920 maybe. Not only is the processing circuitry optimized for video, but so in the sensor. Generally, for video you want to do three separate sensors, one for each primary colour, rather than a sensor with a Bayer filter on it. Gives you better results with motion and such.
The video I've seen from 5Ds was pretty soft overall. Whatever kind of processing it does internally for video softens the image a lot. I'm not sure the reason they chose to do that, but it does not look near as good as a consumer camcorder like the one I mentioned.
I'm amazed at how good smartphones can do for pictures and video these days, and ti is really nice to have a reasonable quality camera with you at all times. However it just can't compete with something that has a big lens on it.
Another way to look at it would be if about 10% of voters gave $50 each, which is a fair bit more but still not at all out of the realm of possibility for most people. Also if you are talking house/senate elections, which is what is begin talked about here, then the actual budget isn't nearly as high.
The point is you really DON'T need rich people to fight these big budgets, regular people can do it in large numbers, and really the numbers are in their favour.
The eternal pessimists on places like Slashdot seem to have this view that there is just unimaginable amounts of money being poured in to this that can never be equaled. That is in fact not the case. A number like $800 million sounds just terrifyingly high but then if you spread it across, say, 20 million people you are now talking $40 per person.
That's his point with this. If this is something you care about, you can toss in some money. Not an onerous amount, two figures is fine. However you get millions of people doing that and hey, that's serious dollars you are talking, the kind of thing that is hard to outspend.
This is part of why everyone, not just the really rich, pays taxes because it adds up to a large amount.
So for political spending as a simple example: Suppose Bill Gates put every bit of his wealth, about $76 billion, towards a PAC. Unbeatable right? Not hardly. If each person over 18 gave $320 dollars, they'd outspend him handily.
Now of course it is ridiculous to think that every eligible voter would give that much but it is equally ridiculous to talk about someone spending that amount of money. The point is that even for ridiculous sums, numbers still favour the population.
A more realistic example would be that Romney's campaign cost about $850 million dollars (the most expensive ever). Crunch the numbers and you'd need half of voters to give $7 average to match that. So literally if you could get half of people to give $10, you'd crush the amount spent on the most expensive campaign ever.
People also seem to forget that the rich didn't become, or stay, rich by spending all their money. Ya, they may be willing to kick in a lot, by a normal person's standard, to an election, but it is still only a small fraction of their wealth. Blowing a significant portion of their wealth on an election would be monumentally stupid.
It really IS doable. What's more, politicians really DO care more about a large number of people voting one way than all the contributions in the world because if they get voted out, well the gravy train stops. So doesn't matter how much money they are offered, if their constituents say "Do this or you are out," and mean it, they are extremely likely to do it.
People in the US do have the ultimate power, they just doesn't exercise it effectively.
If you can show me something the police and maybe military is happy with, then I'll say you have something. However if they have unresolved concerns, then I think it is valid for others to be wary.
While cars have been getting safer, no doubt about that, if there is another force counteracting that, making driving more dangerous, then you don't expect to see numbers go down so much.
In fact another part of the decreased death rate is cellphones themselves. When an accident happens, cellphones allow first responders to be contacted quickly and help to arrive soon. Seconds count with critical injuries.
But ok, let's take raw accident rate. The Census reports 11.5 million traffic accidents in 1990, 10.8 million in 2009 (that's the range for which they present the data). So here we have an increase in population, a massive increase in the number of cellphones, and yet almost a million less accidents per year.
I think that either drunk driving is not as dangerous as it is made out to be, or talking on the cellphone is not as dangerous as drunk driving. The reason is that cellphone use in cars has exploded (as it has in general), yet we continue to see a reduction in fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.
If we go back to 1992, when cell phones were something owned only by the very few and expensive per minute so not used a lot, we have 1.75 deaths/100mvmt. In 2002, when they were getting fairly common, but still not all pervasive (about 49% of people had them), it was 1.51. In 2012 when practically everyone (95% or so) has them, and they do a lot and are the main means of communication, 1.14 (2012 is the last year I can find stats easily for both figures).
Likewise deaths per 100,000 people went down from 15.4, to 14.9, to 10.8.
So though people are driving as much as ever, and cellphones have gone from a rarity to something everyone has in two decades, we see traffic fatalities continue to drop.
That doesn't seem like it should be the case if indeed it is as dangerous as driving drunk. Either it isn't, or the dangers of drunken driving have been vastly overstated.
I'm not dismissing the studies out of hand, but I think that more need to be done, and more controls on things. I think there may be some bias creeping in since there seems to be this want among many researchers for cellphone use in cars to be a bad thing.
It makes me suspicious that something supposedly such a problem could experience such growth, and yet roads could get much safer.
And something they were probably within their rights to do. In all the cases I've seen with buildings getting their own internal amplifiers/repeaters/picocells it is to provide better building coverage and is owned by whoever bought it. So the person who it belongs to can shut it down, if they wish. If you buy a picocell for your apartment, you are not obligated to then run it all the time. You can turn it off, if you wish.
That's very different than interfering with equipment that the phone company has put up. The difference from a moral/ethical/practical standpoint should be easy to see, but it is pretty clear from a legal standpoint as well. The FCC regulates the operation of devices int eh RF range. They say how much power you can output, what kind of license is needed, etc. They don't, however, require their operation or regulate their shutdown. If you own them, you can turn them off.
Same goes for entities like the phone company. They can shut down their cell towers if they want, and they do sometimes (generally because they are using others now). They can't go and make their towers jam competitors though, or output more power than they are licensed for.
When Verizon bought a big license for the C block across the whole US it meant they have a license to transmit in that band, at a given power level, anywhere in the US. It doesn't require them to have transmitters covering the whole area though. It it up to them where they do actually transmit, they are just allowed to do so everywhere, since they bought licenses for the whole nation.
Big difference between turning off a transmitter you own, and blocking somebody else's transmitter.
There is a non-trivial demand for highly interactive stuff on the web. You may not be interested in that, but many people are and thus many developers are. Well, only Flash really does anything approaching a competent job of that. If you want to make something like a game, that runs on all the major browsers and all the major platforms, Flash can do that. Anything else, it is a crap shoot.
For example I remember when the HTML5 Angry Birds came out. Ok, interesting, I'd like to see that. In Chrome, it works more or less flawlessly, since that's what it was made for. It did seem to randomly 'asplode a couple times though. Firefox was nice and stable and everything seemed to work, but slow. The framerate was noticeably jerky. IE worked solid and was smooth as could be... but had no sound.
This is all on Windows, never mind how things would be on OS-X. Not precisely something that gives a lot of confidence in HTML5.
Also there is the simple matter of time. You might be able to make an HTML5 game work as well as a Flash one, if you spent enough time making a port for each browser on each platform. Thing is, that takes a lot of developer time and thus money. You target Flash just once, and it works.
Also the tools for Flash can make development, particularly the graphics and animation part, quite easy.
So if something comes along that does a good job replacing it, something that is well supported by browsers and you really can do easy development in, then sure I expect people will start using it.
So much as just being full of shit. What I mean by that is that people in general, but governments in particular seem to be great at doublethink. They can seem to hold two different contradictory opinions in their head. So governments hate, HATE the idea of other governments spying on them and their citizens. They don't like foreign governments messing with their businesses, either.
However they see no problem when they do it. They don't even find it hypocritical. It is IMPORTANT and NECESSARY when they do it, you see. Not at all like those assholes in other countries!
I think that is probably what is going on with Brazil. They see the US's actions as deplorable, their own actions as essential. They really don't see a dichotomy there.
One is that they do a pretty good job portraying various kinds of geeks. Since it is a comedy it makes light of unflattering and silly characteristics that those geeks have. Well, many people can't laugh at themselves. Real life Sheldon Coopers can't laugh at themselves any more than the character can, and thus the character would be something they don't like.
Another is jealousy. The characters on the show have generally had a good deal of success in love, despite being geeky, with very pretty women. This is something that many of the real life geeks on Slashdot do not share. Hence, there is jealousy of the characters.
Finally there is the hipster-ish anti-pop culture thing. That somehow, if something is popular, it can't be good. For many geek, part of the identity is being an outcast, being different, and liking different things. So liking something mainstream won't do at all for them, not because they don't actually like it but because it would conflict with their self identity.
Personally, I think it is hilarious. Not quite as good as the IT Crowd, but I enjoy it and it makes me laugh regularly. Being that it is a comedy, that is all I can ask:).
They don't need to make sense in a universal fashion, they can be completely unrealistic/unbelievable. However they should make sense internally. Whatever rules are laid out in the game universe, it should make sense within that setting.
Most people can easily suspend disbelief and accept another world. However that suspension can be shattered if nothing makes sense, the rules keep changing, and there's no internal consistency.
That was, for example, one of the big problems in the Mass Effect games. I won't go in to details to not spoil it but the ending of the trilogy was bad in a large part because it had no internal consistency. It didn't make sense in regards to the narrative that had been going on in the games up to that point. It was a deus ex machinia kind of event that just shattered the story for many.
So no game stories don't need to make sense in terms of the real world, but if they are to be good they should make sense in terms of themselves.
That's the situation we have at work. I work at an IT department, and we are all men. Why? Because that's basically all that apply. In the last round of hiring there weren't any women. Ok well I could be clear that I can't say that for sure: The three candidates we picked to interview were all men, and the names on the resumes of the other 20-ish that made it past HR sounded male. We don't ask for pictures or anything so there could have been women in that mix, I don't know. Also I don't know who HR filtered, as they don't pass those on (hence the filtering).
We have had a woman work for us before. Our previous web dev was a woman. She was the only woman to apply, and she was hired (not because she was a woman, because she was the best). However, after about a year her fiance took a job in New York and she moved off with him. In the next round of hiring for that, it was all men.
We can't hire people who don't apply. We really don't have the opportunity to discriminate based on gender because there are just almost no female applicants. I suppose, in theory, HR could be discriminating on our behalf but I find that unlikely because:
1) We are a large state agency and thus have very strong anti-discrimination/EEO rules. 2) HR has quite a few women on staff, perhaps the majority. 3) Most importantly: All HR really does is check qualifications and pass on resumes that seem to meet the minimums for the job. They tend to know fuck-all about the position, it is just match our minimums list vs the resume.
So ya, 100% of the IT people in our college are male, and about 90% of the secretaries are female. Well, in the case of IT, that's because of who applies. We can't go and make women apply.
Blame the victim is popular on Slashdot. If a person doesn't have perfect digital security, run all their services themselves, and stay on top of everything, why it is their own fault if they get hacked!
Of course the people who think that then would get extremely angry if someone broke in to their house, despite their piss poor physical security (almost nobody has good security on their house). Basically it is just a mentality of "I can do what I want but you can't do anything to me."
I like Canada a lot, have a lot of relatives there (hence the Canadian citizenship). I wouldn't mind living there, other than the cold.
However what with all that, I understand some of the downsides. There are things which aren't as good there as in the US (Internet is one of them in general, cellphone service another). There are some that are better. There are others that are kinda a wash, in that the problems are different than the problems in the US.
I find that people who have never been there, only been there only briefly, have a much rosier opinion of the situation in Canada than I do, or than my family that lives there does.
It isn't quite as good as people think with regards to money and politics, and certainly not with regards to the Internet. Canada's 'net speeds vs costs do not compare all that well to the US's.
Canada is a very nice (if cold) country that I visit every summer (I'm a dual citizen) but it isn't the utopia some Americans seem to think it is.
There's a lot of politics and BS involved, right of way costs and such. Also issues of older infrastructure. The US had widespread cable and phone back before many countries, and as such there is this lethargy with companies to just try and use what's already there rather than put in all new stuff that works better.
However one thing to be careful of when you look at your Internet is how the backhaul is. Something I've observed with a number of the "really fast, no limits, very cheap," networks is that they are basically a big WAN. They don't have the backhaul to the rest of the Internet to maintain those speeds. So big speeds to your neighbours, and your ISP, but not so much to the world.
If you do speeds tests, make sure you test to something not on your ISP, and a decent bit away. That gives you a more realistic speed test. Good internet in the US tends to be fast too all places like that.
For example I pay $100 per month (about 72 Euro) for 150mbit/20mbit Internet, with burst speeds up to 180mbit. Testing to a server in town here, I get that, actually a little over, 183mbit. Testing to a different provider in another state, about 550km away, I get 175mbit. Testing to yet another provider across the country, around 3000km away, I get 140mbit. So I get the speed promised, to a diverse amount of networks. The backhaul is there to support my connection. That is part of the cost.
Not saying it isn't for yours, just check if you want to compare it to US Internet. I've seen more than a few cases where big numbers to the home aren't backed up by big pipes to the Internet. So the speedtest server at your ISP gives you amazing numbers, but one on a different datacenter a few hundred klicks away is much slower.
The thing is USB doesn't have DMA. This is on purpose, it allows for cheaper devices and is more secure. However it means everything has to go through the CPU. So higher load, higher latency. Thunderbolt is just PCIe (and display) so it is as low latency and impact as a card in the system.
For lots of usages, the difference doesn't matter, but for heavy hitting stuff it can.
I'd rather get something less likely to have issues, like a PCEngines box running Monowall or a Edgerouter Lite (which I did). More powerful and more open.
I just find it funny how people seem to think that loading OSS firmware is some magic prevention that'll keep the evil NSA away (like they need this exploit to spy on you, they'll just monitor you at your ISP). No, not if you believe the router companies are complicit in implementing it for that purpose. It'd be much easier to just go lower level.
If you presume that a backdoor like this is intentional, and is there for some nefarious purpose like the NSA or something, they can just move it to the chips themselves. The code that runs on on the CPU is only one small part of what goes on in there. It would be very easy to have code baked in to a chip with a backdoor that couldn't be removed or altered by the OS, because it is lower level.
So don't assume an OSS firmware gets you out of trouble.
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For example I work in a mixed environment, Windows and Linux desktops and servers. It is a research university so we do a lot of custom setup and deployments. Need a good system for all that, and for maintaining 50,000 user accounts and all that. We do it, but Linux takes a lot more faffing about. Our Linux admin spends a lot of time fighting with scripts, puppet, dependencies, etc to get systems working and deploying. It works, don't get me wrong, but it takes me a shitload less time to do it on Windows.
Well, our time costs money too. So if support takes a lot more staff time, then you need more staff and that costs more.
I think too many geeks who think Linux is just as easy have set it up on their home network. They have like 3 computers, all using local accounts, and everything is great. Ya well, try it in a large environment. Try good user, group, and policy management with the tools it has (we don't, we use AD for everything and have it auth against that). What you do at home isn't the same as what you do when you have thousands of systems.
Also having the right applications can be a big deal. Some things, you can get for Linux no problem. Some you can get, but they aren't up to par with the Windows variants and can make your workflow much slower. Others you just can't get. So that can make a big difference in the feasibility.
Like say video editing. Yes, technically you CAN do it in Linux. I'm sure given enough time, you could do anything you needed to, if nothing else by exporting the frames as images, hand editing, and reimporting. However it is way slower and much more difficult than on Windows or a Mac. The tools are just not very good. Free, but not very good. Ya well, that $500 for Sony Vegas and $150 for Windows doesn't matter much against the time you pay editors, cameramen, and so on. You don't need it to be much faster, workflow wise, to make that up and more.
It seriously amazes me how little thought many geeks give the "it's open so anyone can support it!" argument. Seriously? You think that anyone can just sit down, read the source of a complex project, and fix and maintain it? It is just that easy?
Of course not. You need not just a programmer, but a good team and they can't be idiots. Maintaining something as large as an OS is a big job. So if the primary developers aren't doing it any more, you have to hire someone else to do it. So what's that cost? You can't ignore that, pretend like it isn't a real business cost just like software licenses.
Also there's the overall cost of sticking with something really old. This bitching about XP upgrades is silly because, by and large, the systems that need the upgrade are extremely old (I'm an IT support guy by profession). So if you took the route of paying to maintain this extremely old software on extremely old hardware it could end up costing you a lot in the long run in terms of productivity, as well as support.
Heck we've seen this in large scale systems like mainframes. IBM will generally support a mainframe as long as you like... for a price. You get companies running shit so old it is exceedingly expensive for the maintenance contract, and it is inflexible and has trouble dealing with their current business needs because it was designed 30 years ago. An upgrade would be a much better use of resources.
We even have a situation like that at work. We have an old Netapp FAS that we are still paying support on. 250GB SATA drives, no upgrade path. The support contract is multiple thousands a year, and getting higher. Netapp is happy to take our money and keep ti running but it can't run the new OnTap, can't take larger disks, etc, etc. The right answer, the one we are doing soon (hopefully) is to replace it with a new unit, migrate the data, and stand it down. Ya it is a bit of work, but it will be cheaper AND better in the long run.
Maintenance, upgrades, lifecycles, these are things you deal with for anything, software included. If you really think it is a feasible idea to just maintain a version of Linux forever, you are kidding yourself.
Also if you are wondering what long term maintenance of Linux costs, check out RHEL sometime. See what a support contract for a heavily supported, stable, Linux runs you. Then consider that MS has the same lifecycle on their OSes.
Because you media types went and fucked it up as hard as you could. I am the sort of person who would like to buy a fair bit of Blu-ray movies. I don't mind movies on disc, I have a player, and I'm fussy about picture and sound quality. Blu-ray is noticeably better than streaming video on my system.
However, greed and stupidity have screwed it up. For one it is just too expensive. I'll see a new movie int he store and the Blu-ray version is $10 above the DVD version. No, I'm not paying you for the extra bits. It does not cost you more to make. I'm not going to go and drop $35 on the Blu-ray version of something.
Then there's the DRM. "That wouldn't affect you unless you are a pirate!" you say? Bullshit. So while my TV setup is nice, by far the highest def system in my house is my computer. It has a high end home theater speaker setup connected to it, and a professional monitor. So I wanted to watch one of my Blu-rays on it. It has a BD-RW, it has software, it has a GPU with the stupid "secure" drivers, and everything is HDCP compliant. So I fire it up and... no dice. See I mirror my video signal, one goes to the monitor for display, one goes to the soundcard to provide clock for the audio. That isn't allowed, even though every device is HDCP compliant.
It also means should I wish to watch on my laptop, I'd have to buy it a Blu-ray player and lug the discs with me, there's no ability to copy them over.
Is it any wonder I'm not more interested? I have a few Blu-ray discs, but not many, and I don't buy them often. I'm not paying an inflated price, and part of their interest, the extremely high quality, is dulled by the knowledge that they won't work on my highest end system.
Netflix may not look as good, but it is cheap, and it works on, well, everything I own practically.
How's Transmeta doing these days? Oh that's right they are defunct.
That kind of thing doesn't work well for performance.
A big problem in many departments seems to be they just don't understand new technology. They don't understand that these devices can be located easily, and that they can have companies do the locating and give them a result if they get a warrant. Also that it is often worth doing because they nail someone with a bunch of other stolen goods usually.
This kind of thing happened at the university I work at. One of our employees got his laptop stolen by what can only be described as extreme stupidity on his part. Laptop had Computrace so my boss called them and got the tracking going. They were able to locate it, it was still in the city and being used regularly. This was handed to the police... and nothing happened for a long time. There was back and forth with my boss, the university police, the city police, the general council, etc, etc. Finally they seemed to figure shit out, got a warrant, found the guy and busted him. They recovered a bunch of stolen goods.
Of course after that it took even longer to actually get the laptop back, since it had to sit in the evidence room while all that went on, but we did get it.
Really to me it seemed mostly like the police just didn't understand what was going on. They thought they were being asked to go on a wild goose chase or something and didn't understand that the case was being handed to them all wrapped with a bow.
Education isn't the whole pboelm, but I think it'd help a lot. If police forces understood:
1) What to do. As in what company do you call, what do you need (just a phone call, subpoena, warrant, etc), and what kind of information do you get.
2) That this kind of thing gives you all the probable cause you need.
3) That when you bust someone like this, you usually get to nail them for a bunch more stuff. They generally didn't just make one theft, so you get to recover a bunch more stolen goods, and often other crimes (drugs, etc) as well.
Then I think it might be more common. They get a call saying "My phone has been stolen," they open up their "Policel2recoverphones" guide and start asking the questions it says and then go from there.
Why the comparison to a still camera? Ya I know that it can shoot video, as basically all DSLRs can these days but that isn't what it is made to not, isn't what it is best at. Why not compare it to a 1080p video camera? A Panasonic X920 maybe. Not only is the processing circuitry optimized for video, but so in the sensor. Generally, for video you want to do three separate sensors, one for each primary colour, rather than a sensor with a Bayer filter on it. Gives you better results with motion and such.
The video I've seen from 5Ds was pretty soft overall. Whatever kind of processing it does internally for video softens the image a lot. I'm not sure the reason they chose to do that, but it does not look near as good as a consumer camcorder like the one I mentioned.
I'm amazed at how good smartphones can do for pictures and video these days, and ti is really nice to have a reasonable quality camera with you at all times. However it just can't compete with something that has a big lens on it.
You see evidence all the time on the news and if you want to see a ton more, read police reports. Most criminals are morons.
So, if a TV show shows them how to make meth, you'll get some dummies that'll say "Hey let's do that!" Thus, best if it doesn't actually work.
Of course people can just go and look it up, if they are really interested, but this helps weed some people out.
Another way to look at it would be if about 10% of voters gave $50 each, which is a fair bit more but still not at all out of the realm of possibility for most people. Also if you are talking house/senate elections, which is what is begin talked about here, then the actual budget isn't nearly as high.
The point is you really DON'T need rich people to fight these big budgets, regular people can do it in large numbers, and really the numbers are in their favour.
The eternal pessimists on places like Slashdot seem to have this view that there is just unimaginable amounts of money being poured in to this that can never be equaled. That is in fact not the case. A number like $800 million sounds just terrifyingly high but then if you spread it across, say, 20 million people you are now talking $40 per person.
That's his point with this. If this is something you care about, you can toss in some money. Not an onerous amount, two figures is fine. However you get millions of people doing that and hey, that's serious dollars you are talking, the kind of thing that is hard to outspend.
This is part of why everyone, not just the really rich, pays taxes because it adds up to a large amount.
So for political spending as a simple example: Suppose Bill Gates put every bit of his wealth, about $76 billion, towards a PAC. Unbeatable right? Not hardly. If each person over 18 gave $320 dollars, they'd outspend him handily.
Now of course it is ridiculous to think that every eligible voter would give that much but it is equally ridiculous to talk about someone spending that amount of money. The point is that even for ridiculous sums, numbers still favour the population.
A more realistic example would be that Romney's campaign cost about $850 million dollars (the most expensive ever). Crunch the numbers and you'd need half of voters to give $7 average to match that. So literally if you could get half of people to give $10, you'd crush the amount spent on the most expensive campaign ever.
People also seem to forget that the rich didn't become, or stay, rich by spending all their money. Ya, they may be willing to kick in a lot, by a normal person's standard, to an election, but it is still only a small fraction of their wealth. Blowing a significant portion of their wealth on an election would be monumentally stupid.
It really IS doable. What's more, politicians really DO care more about a large number of people voting one way than all the contributions in the world because if they get voted out, well the gravy train stops. So doesn't matter how much money they are offered, if their constituents say "Do this or you are out," and mean it, they are extremely likely to do it.
People in the US do have the ultimate power, they just doesn't exercise it effectively.
If you can show me something the police and maybe military is happy with, then I'll say you have something. However if they have unresolved concerns, then I think it is valid for others to be wary.
While cars have been getting safer, no doubt about that, if there is another force counteracting that, making driving more dangerous, then you don't expect to see numbers go down so much.
In fact another part of the decreased death rate is cellphones themselves. When an accident happens, cellphones allow first responders to be contacted quickly and help to arrive soon. Seconds count with critical injuries.
But ok, let's take raw accident rate. The Census reports 11.5 million traffic accidents in 1990, 10.8 million in 2009 (that's the range for which they present the data). So here we have an increase in population, a massive increase in the number of cellphones, and yet almost a million less accidents per year.
I think that either drunk driving is not as dangerous as it is made out to be, or talking on the cellphone is not as dangerous as drunk driving. The reason is that cellphone use in cars has exploded (as it has in general), yet we continue to see a reduction in fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.
If we go back to 1992, when cell phones were something owned only by the very few and expensive per minute so not used a lot, we have 1.75 deaths/100mvmt. In 2002, when they were getting fairly common, but still not all pervasive (about 49% of people had them), it was 1.51. In 2012 when practically everyone (95% or so) has them, and they do a lot and are the main means of communication, 1.14 (2012 is the last year I can find stats easily for both figures).
Likewise deaths per 100,000 people went down from 15.4, to 14.9, to 10.8.
So though people are driving as much as ever, and cellphones have gone from a rarity to something everyone has in two decades, we see traffic fatalities continue to drop.
That doesn't seem like it should be the case if indeed it is as dangerous as driving drunk. Either it isn't, or the dangers of drunken driving have been vastly overstated.
I'm not dismissing the studies out of hand, but I think that more need to be done, and more controls on things. I think there may be some bias creeping in since there seems to be this want among many researchers for cellphone use in cars to be a bad thing.
It makes me suspicious that something supposedly such a problem could experience such growth, and yet roads could get much safer.
And something they were probably within their rights to do. In all the cases I've seen with buildings getting their own internal amplifiers/repeaters/picocells it is to provide better building coverage and is owned by whoever bought it. So the person who it belongs to can shut it down, if they wish. If you buy a picocell for your apartment, you are not obligated to then run it all the time. You can turn it off, if you wish.
That's very different than interfering with equipment that the phone company has put up. The difference from a moral/ethical/practical standpoint should be easy to see, but it is pretty clear from a legal standpoint as well. The FCC regulates the operation of devices int eh RF range. They say how much power you can output, what kind of license is needed, etc. They don't, however, require their operation or regulate their shutdown. If you own them, you can turn them off.
Same goes for entities like the phone company. They can shut down their cell towers if they want, and they do sometimes (generally because they are using others now). They can't go and make their towers jam competitors though, or output more power than they are licensed for.
When Verizon bought a big license for the C block across the whole US it meant they have a license to transmit in that band, at a given power level, anywhere in the US. It doesn't require them to have transmitters covering the whole area though. It it up to them where they do actually transmit, they are just allowed to do so everywhere, since they bought licenses for the whole nation.
Big difference between turning off a transmitter you own, and blocking somebody else's transmitter.
There is a non-trivial demand for highly interactive stuff on the web. You may not be interested in that, but many people are and thus many developers are. Well, only Flash really does anything approaching a competent job of that. If you want to make something like a game, that runs on all the major browsers and all the major platforms, Flash can do that. Anything else, it is a crap shoot.
For example I remember when the HTML5 Angry Birds came out. Ok, interesting, I'd like to see that. In Chrome, it works more or less flawlessly, since that's what it was made for. It did seem to randomly 'asplode a couple times though. Firefox was nice and stable and everything seemed to work, but slow. The framerate was noticeably jerky. IE worked solid and was smooth as could be... but had no sound.
This is all on Windows, never mind how things would be on OS-X. Not precisely something that gives a lot of confidence in HTML5.
Also there is the simple matter of time. You might be able to make an HTML5 game work as well as a Flash one, if you spent enough time making a port for each browser on each platform. Thing is, that takes a lot of developer time and thus money. You target Flash just once, and it works.
Also the tools for Flash can make development, particularly the graphics and animation part, quite easy.
So if something comes along that does a good job replacing it, something that is well supported by browsers and you really can do easy development in, then sure I expect people will start using it.
So much as just being full of shit. What I mean by that is that people in general, but governments in particular seem to be great at doublethink. They can seem to hold two different contradictory opinions in their head. So governments hate, HATE the idea of other governments spying on them and their citizens. They don't like foreign governments messing with their businesses, either.
However they see no problem when they do it. They don't even find it hypocritical. It is IMPORTANT and NECESSARY when they do it, you see. Not at all like those assholes in other countries!
I think that is probably what is going on with Brazil. They see the US's actions as deplorable, their own actions as essential. They really don't see a dichotomy there.
One is that they do a pretty good job portraying various kinds of geeks. Since it is a comedy it makes light of unflattering and silly characteristics that those geeks have. Well, many people can't laugh at themselves. Real life Sheldon Coopers can't laugh at themselves any more than the character can, and thus the character would be something they don't like.
Another is jealousy. The characters on the show have generally had a good deal of success in love, despite being geeky, with very pretty women. This is something that many of the real life geeks on Slashdot do not share. Hence, there is jealousy of the characters.
Finally there is the hipster-ish anti-pop culture thing. That somehow, if something is popular, it can't be good. For many geek, part of the identity is being an outcast, being different, and liking different things. So liking something mainstream won't do at all for them, not because they don't actually like it but because it would conflict with their self identity.
Personally, I think it is hilarious. Not quite as good as the IT Crowd, but I enjoy it and it makes me laugh regularly. Being that it is a comedy, that is all I can ask :).
They don't need to make sense in a universal fashion, they can be completely unrealistic/unbelievable. However they should make sense internally. Whatever rules are laid out in the game universe, it should make sense within that setting.
Most people can easily suspend disbelief and accept another world. However that suspension can be shattered if nothing makes sense, the rules keep changing, and there's no internal consistency.
That was, for example, one of the big problems in the Mass Effect games. I won't go in to details to not spoil it but the ending of the trilogy was bad in a large part because it had no internal consistency. It didn't make sense in regards to the narrative that had been going on in the games up to that point. It was a deus ex machinia kind of event that just shattered the story for many.
So no game stories don't need to make sense in terms of the real world, but if they are to be good they should make sense in terms of themselves.
That's the situation we have at work. I work at an IT department, and we are all men. Why? Because that's basically all that apply. In the last round of hiring there weren't any women. Ok well I could be clear that I can't say that for sure: The three candidates we picked to interview were all men, and the names on the resumes of the other 20-ish that made it past HR sounded male. We don't ask for pictures or anything so there could have been women in that mix, I don't know. Also I don't know who HR filtered, as they don't pass those on (hence the filtering).
We have had a woman work for us before. Our previous web dev was a woman. She was the only woman to apply, and she was hired (not because she was a woman, because she was the best). However, after about a year her fiance took a job in New York and she moved off with him. In the next round of hiring for that, it was all men.
We can't hire people who don't apply. We really don't have the opportunity to discriminate based on gender because there are just almost no female applicants. I suppose, in theory, HR could be discriminating on our behalf but I find that unlikely because:
1) We are a large state agency and thus have very strong anti-discrimination/EEO rules.
2) HR has quite a few women on staff, perhaps the majority.
3) Most importantly: All HR really does is check qualifications and pass on resumes that seem to meet the minimums for the job. They tend to know fuck-all about the position, it is just match our minimums list vs the resume.
So ya, 100% of the IT people in our college are male, and about 90% of the secretaries are female. Well, in the case of IT, that's because of who applies. We can't go and make women apply.
Blame the victim is popular on Slashdot. If a person doesn't have perfect digital security, run all their services themselves, and stay on top of everything, why it is their own fault if they get hacked!
Of course the people who think that then would get extremely angry if someone broke in to their house, despite their piss poor physical security (almost nobody has good security on their house). Basically it is just a mentality of "I can do what I want but you can't do anything to me."
I like Canada a lot, have a lot of relatives there (hence the Canadian citizenship). I wouldn't mind living there, other than the cold.
However what with all that, I understand some of the downsides. There are things which aren't as good there as in the US (Internet is one of them in general, cellphone service another). There are some that are better. There are others that are kinda a wash, in that the problems are different than the problems in the US.
I find that people who have never been there, only been there only briefly, have a much rosier opinion of the situation in Canada than I do, or than my family that lives there does.
It isn't quite as good as people think with regards to money and politics, and certainly not with regards to the Internet. Canada's 'net speeds vs costs do not compare all that well to the US's.
Canada is a very nice (if cold) country that I visit every summer (I'm a dual citizen) but it isn't the utopia some Americans seem to think it is.
There's a lot of politics and BS involved, right of way costs and such. Also issues of older infrastructure. The US had widespread cable and phone back before many countries, and as such there is this lethargy with companies to just try and use what's already there rather than put in all new stuff that works better.
However one thing to be careful of when you look at your Internet is how the backhaul is. Something I've observed with a number of the "really fast, no limits, very cheap," networks is that they are basically a big WAN. They don't have the backhaul to the rest of the Internet to maintain those speeds. So big speeds to your neighbours, and your ISP, but not so much to the world.
If you do speeds tests, make sure you test to something not on your ISP, and a decent bit away. That gives you a more realistic speed test. Good internet in the US tends to be fast too all places like that.
For example I pay $100 per month (about 72 Euro) for 150mbit/20mbit Internet, with burst speeds up to 180mbit. Testing to a server in town here, I get that, actually a little over, 183mbit. Testing to a different provider in another state, about 550km away, I get 175mbit. Testing to yet another provider across the country, around 3000km away, I get 140mbit. So I get the speed promised, to a diverse amount of networks. The backhaul is there to support my connection. That is part of the cost.
Not saying it isn't for yours, just check if you want to compare it to US Internet. I've seen more than a few cases where big numbers to the home aren't backed up by big pipes to the Internet. So the speedtest server at your ISP gives you amazing numbers, but one on a different datacenter a few hundred klicks away is much slower.
The thing is USB doesn't have DMA. This is on purpose, it allows for cheaper devices and is more secure. However it means everything has to go through the CPU. So higher load, higher latency. Thunderbolt is just PCIe (and display) so it is as low latency and impact as a card in the system.
For lots of usages, the difference doesn't matter, but for heavy hitting stuff it can.
I'd rather get something less likely to have issues, like a PCEngines box running Monowall or a Edgerouter Lite (which I did). More powerful and more open.
I just find it funny how people seem to think that loading OSS firmware is some magic prevention that'll keep the evil NSA away (like they need this exploit to spy on you, they'll just monitor you at your ISP). No, not if you believe the router companies are complicit in implementing it for that purpose. It'd be much easier to just go lower level.
If you presume that a backdoor like this is intentional, and is there for some nefarious purpose like the NSA or something, they can just move it to the chips themselves. The code that runs on on the CPU is only one small part of what goes on in there. It would be very easy to have code baked in to a chip with a backdoor that couldn't be removed or altered by the OS, because it is lower level.
So don't assume an OSS firmware gets you out of trouble.