I've never paid more than £1000 ($1500) for a car in my life, and they all give me at least 30,000 miles before dying and often that's after 100,000 miles of usage by other people? My maintenance costs are never more than about £500 ($750) over the year for any one particular car because if it costs that, it's cheaper to buy another car in the long run.
I have no more reliability or service issues than any other car driver (in fact, probably a lot less) and I don't really care if the car never starts again because I can replace it next month without having to budget specifically.
When I see second-hand electric cars that do the same, then we can talk. Your number 5 is going to make that nigh-on impossible for current models, whether you want to argue it or not.
Batteries of any kind do not last forever. Of those that last longest, lead-acid has proven the best value choice (and hence why the previous generation of all-electric cars in Britain - otherwise known as milk-floats - have been using them since the 60's) and that's the only battery in my current car and costs about £50 to replace when it dies. Your battery will never make it to any reasonable second-hand market, which means no-one will buy it, replacing it will be uneconomical (and the car will end up being recycled quicker) and you won't be able to recoup its cost. It also means that the second-hand market for electrics is dead before it starts until someone comes up with someone marvellous and hence lots of people (who have NEVER owned a new car) will never be able to use one.
Why buy something that's new and untested when you can wait a few years and get the same benefits at a cheaper purchase price? Give me a nudge when I can buy an electric car with 100,000 miles on the clock, a full service history, no major historical problems and no current mechanical problems. For a petrol car with the same criteria, they publish magazines full of nothing but the damn things being advertised.
But, again, the grammar actually isn't that bad. It's redundant, yes, but grammatically the errors are minor compared to the number of sins I've seen committed on here.
The original post was complaining that the summary wasn't readable. Aside from is/are and an extraneous 's', it's perfectly readable. Nobody said it was *interesting*, though.
Unfortunately, those 3 countries were using their measurements long before the metric system even existed, and happen to control a vast portion of the world's GDP.
I agree they should put both measurements on but if you ask an Englishman how much he weighs, he'll tell you in stone. If you ask how tall he is, he'll tell you in feet. If you ask how fast he's going, he'll tell you in miles per hour. If you ask his penis size, he'll tell you in inches. It pretty much doesn't matter what generation he's from, that's the unit of measure he'll give you by default.
However, if he's a scientist who isn't writing an article for popular consumption, or he's a schoolchild in a class, he might give you metric *AS WELL* just to be clear.
Three feet to the yard (which is about a metre). Twelve inches to the foot. About 5/8 mph to the km/h. Seven furlongs in a mile. 112 pound to the hundredweight. 2,240 lb to the ton. What could be simpler than that?
It doesn't apply to me. If the US block access to my site from the US, it doesn't affect me in the slightest. They could block access from the US to every site in my country as far as I'm concerned. Now, maybe it affects *someone* (I'm sure some companies would lose US import monies, but I'm equally sure the US would lose just as much in reverse), but until the EU even begin to consider similar laws that I get a say in, there's nothing I can do for you at all. I can agree with you or not. It makes no difference. Holding your service/data to ransom until you've rammed it down my throat doesn't help your cause.
So that's why *I've* complained about sites doing stupid SOPA blackouts - they've denied me access to content I want to see because of some political motive that I have no control over at all, and that I have to find ways to bypass. Sound much like SOPA itself?
Just because your country are doing something stupid doesn't mean that somehow involving me or assuming I'll just agree with you will make me feel strongly enough to take up your cause. SOPA is a stupid idea. But it's not MY stupid idea. And it won't affect me or my sites or my use of the Internet or my income in any way whatsoever.
In actual fact, the SOPA blackouts just made me find alternate sites and avenues to the content I would normally use. They actually *helped* me not be reliant on people who think their service is there to push their own political agenda instead of being a service. As soon as you "personalise" the service that much, I lose interest in it because it's more about personality and your beliefs than anything to do with the service they are providing.
Also, I don't need politics (especially foreign politics) spoon-fed to me by websites who assume I don't understand and that I'll just agree with them because they have inconvenienced me. Whether or not I do understand or even sympathise, that's one way to royally piss me off.
I equate the SOPA blackouts with the London Tube strikes - I may or may not agree with the underlying cause, but inconveniencing me and holding me to blackmail until I agree with you will make me NOT agree with you just out of principle. The DMCA was similarly fucking stupid, but nobody protested then and if you had, I'd have had the same opinion - I don't care because it doesn't affect me or my country, and I can't affect a foreign political system in any way (Fuck, I can barely affect my own!).
Sure, we have our own versions of some laws and THAT'S worth my interest but even people/sites/organisations in my own country trying to enforce their opinion on me through such actions is extremely counter-productive. I'm not stupid and, I'm afraid, I knew of ten times more important laws that got passed silently without any protest but I knew about them and they didn't get made public. Even those where people tried to make them public, the general populous had no concept of them and they were hidden in the news under celebrities being pregnant and politicians revealing details of their sex lives.
Publicity stunts to raise awareness are one thing but this is no more worth it than, say, the fact the US is still keeping prisoners in captivity without charge a decade after their arrest, in inhumane conditions and subjecting them to torture. SOPA, in comparison, is like preaching to a heart surgeon in the middle of an operation that hospital waiting rooms sometimes have chewing gum stuck to the bottom of their seats.
Don't shove your politics down my throat. And don't interrupt my productivity for the sake of "awareness" when I was aware of it before and am more concerned about a lot more important things than whether the US turns itself into a country like China. In some ways, it may do us all a favour if the US just forces itself off the net entirely by misusing these powers and making other countries build replacement, non-US, infrastructure.
Kodak invented the digital camera. They didn't capitalise it. Kodak digital cameras are almost unheard of and have been even since the early days. In Europe they had precisely zip of any percentage of the market at all (and Europe's a pretty big market to be missing out on). The only one I've *ever* seen in the flesh was an early 1.something MP one.
Strong sales of even one model does not a success make - they failed to get into the digital thing quickly enough to make a success, even if they invented it. It's not a research failure but a business failure.
Similarly for everything else - their name is spattered across lots of industry area but they failed to keep up to the point where they actually made money. I'm not suggesting the products aren't there - they aren't making money. Any idiot can be selling millions at pitiful profit margins enough to sink even the largest company, and that's what they did.
They also culled everything but film in their history, several times. Their R&D and technical capability was good. Their business sense was non-existent. Nobody heard of Kodak digital cameras or printers until they already had burned through a dozen from competitors.
Kodak died by not getting into the digital "thing" quickly enough and then doing poorly by the time they did. Same with Polaroid, really. Too stubborn to admit that their technology was coming to the end of an era and develop a replacement and instead letting their competitors (and even just random no-name companies at the time) do it for them.
At least they'll die having done almost nothing but film photography, so it looks like they just died as the industry for that died, rather than dragging the name through the dirt for decades trying to cling on to film's replacement.
I don't get attached to brands, but I do object to people running their businesses badly. The world's largest consumer of silver at one point - but totally failed to adapt when everyone stopped buying film. It's not a nice epitaph.
I grew up in and around London. I consider it a good night if I can see more than the Plough with the naked eye after ten minutes of standing and letting my eyes adjust.
My girlfriend (from a rural part of Italy) keeps on about showing me the Milky Way, meteorites and fireflies. I have honestly never seen any of them.
The only way to "see" more than a handful of the brightest stars near a city like that is to have a very sensitive camera and a "BULB" mode where you can do exposures of whatever length you need.
Or everyone will run their systems via a single machine that does firewalling, has a single address, blocks access to internal networks and provides VPN for those privileged users who still need it.
Because it's a LOT easier to separate the world into external/internal and handle the transition through something like an authenticated VPN than having everything potentially accessible and just waiting for the moment you slightly misconfigure the firewall (not to mention having to know that there are seventy machines you could connect to, or whether your particular machine is on/off, rather than just connecting to a well-named and advertised gateway). Hell, on IPv4 it's outgoing traffic that you spend most of your time discarding, rather than incoming, as desktops try to broadcast their presence to the world.
The point of a gateway is not just to act as some kind of IPv4 "fixer", but to simplify policy and addressing. IPv6 solves neither of those problems and certainly allocating a routable IP to everything imaginable (whether firewalled or not) is not something that's suddenly going to happen. For a start, your network admins will kill you and it will cause them headaches (i.e. instead of "I can't get on the VPN", you'll get "Someone's switched my computer off on the 23rd floor, could you just pop up....").
As said in another reply to yourself - you could do this with IPv4 if you thought ahead. The problem is that it doesn't save you anything when only one machine can act as the gateway to the network anyway - all you do is make the firewall config a lot harder (and have to play with it more as a result) whereas you could have just added a user to whatever VPN you liked or similar and EVERYONE in the company would instantly know the way to access the network (by connecting to vpn.example.com and not desktop25184.example.com).
NAT / Port-forwarding is certainly a hack, but it's not the reason to ditch IPv4 for IPv6 and there's always been ways around it. IPv6 deployments won't see any more publicly-routed traffic than previously.
What were you expecting to happen? IPv6 things will give you an IPv6 address and use it, and IPv4 things are unchanged. The majority of stuff is still IPv4-only and the only "surprising" thing is that the modem had a firmware that could handle it.
The problem is not what happens when you have modern OS, good ISP, simple configs, IPv4 fallback and modems that have IPv6-firmware for them but how you get to that point.
How do you upgrade servers and machines that aren't IPv6-enabled, how do you upgrade that old boiler software or access control software or internal wireless box to support things, how do you get an IPv6 address allocated to you on a business line, how do you make your servers accessible over both, how do you afford to replace all the things that can't be upgraded (for almost zero new "features"), how do you cope once IPv4 goes away completely, etc.?
None of them are huge obstacles with proper planning, support and finance but almost nothing is a huge obstacle with proper planning, support and finance. The problem is that an awful lot of people *won't* be able to upgrade as simply as you did.
It took ten minutes to IPv6 enable all my domains and servers and pass all the tests for them. But I still haven't managed to tunnel IPv6 into OpenVPN at my hosted server and use IPv6 natively from its allocated address. And tunnelling OpenVPN TO an IPv6 endpoint address still isn't possible as far as I can tell. My home connection is still IPv6-less, all my internal hardware uses only IPv4, etc. etc. but my laptop can connect to IPv6 networks no problem at all.
This is the problem with IPv6 - there is no one magic switch to throw. *Everything* has to be inspected, evaluated, upgraded, replaced, configured, etc. in order to work. And for what benefit? At the moment none. In a few years, every ISP will just have 4to6 tunnels by default anyway to let people still on old hardware carry on without upgrades. But a single, simple IPv6 deployment means nothing. My servers are IPv6 and so is my laptop. Trouble is, finding a sod in between that cares about it (what about your 3G provider, for instance?)
That's like saying that install.sh is named that way because of a filesystem limitation. It isn't.
RDP is a protocol with those exact initials. TXT, I'll give you but I've never seen a.text file in my life. Log - it's a word that means something on its own. MSI, Microsoft Installer? This is midway between the first two. DLL, it's a dynamic link library, no more different to a.so
There's a big difference between "named in a compatible way with 8.3 by accident" and "restricted to 8.3 because of its origin." Only a few files (.jpg,.htm) are actually called like that because of the limitation (and I've seen.jpeg and.html a lot in the wild) but most aren't (.png,.gif,.wmf, etc. for instance, which are the name of the format in its entirety).
Amateurs: Nothing at all. "Know-a-bit's": Almost nothing. Professional users: Nothing we couldn't do before. State-of-the-art, top-dog, storage-gods: Nothing very special or new at all.
Now, if you'd said that it finally supported WinFS-style file tagging and searching, then you'd have ticked lots of boxes for all manner of users. As it is, it's a "slightly better filesystem than before" and hardly newsworthy (out of all your "features", I only spot one that you can't already do with Windows alone and that would ever be exposed to someone NOT using bit-level access to the drive - file level encryption).
I'm currently using Opera - Two windows and over 20 tabs open with different fully-loaded "big name" websites in all tabs. Some logged in, some not. Instant access to all my emails dating back to pre-2000 (with instant-narrow searching) covering some 5-6 Gb of email files on my profile (several POP and IMAP accounts all downloaded entirely to the Opera mail client) - which Opera stores as SQLite files, IIRC.
The same Opera session has been running for about 2 weeks straight, just suspend/resume as I take the laptop from work to home (and it's actually being used for about 16 hours a day for work and personal use, not sitting idle!)
Memory usage in Windows? 300Mb.
There's no reason for anything to use Gb's of memory internally. Sure, there's caching etc. but that *can* adjust to the memory left in the PC (i.e. on small PC's, ditch memory cache, on large PC's leave it in memory). Program use, though, loading on common websites even with tons of Javascript - there's no reason to use more than a few hundred megs or so.
And my Opera *FLIES* when switching tabs etc. and doesn't touch the disk at all. Granted that there are places you can have memory/speed trade-offs but a bog-standard application like a web browser isn't one of them. Read network, interpret, display, forget or remember when tab is closed depending on user preference. That's it. There's nothing complex there at all to suck up memory like Firefox can.
My purpose would be a) security monitoring (I text the car, it tells me where it is), b) location awareness (car "knows" if it's moving and sends me a text), c) Finding my car in a strange town (I'm very forgetful and lost my car for over an hour once in Hannover).
Arduino GSM/GPRS / GPS-Shield: 126,05 â
optional GSM Antenna âoeAT-TG.09.0113â : 9,92 â
optional Power Supply: 8,40 â
Arduino GSM / GPRS / GPS-Shield â" Kit : 158,82 â
excl. VAT. plus Postage.
Not including the £/â 50 to buy an Arduino (and VAT is about 20% at the moment).
It would cost me less to buy a small netbook than it would to buy the shield on its own! Or five Raspberry Pi's. Or one Raspberry Pi, a bluetooth USB adaptor, a bluetooth GPS (dirt cheap, pound-store stuff now) and a 3G dongle (which places will throw at you now to get you out of the store) about 2-3 times over AT LEAST. Hence I could build three of these projects for the price of starting to build one with an Arduino.
This is my point. I have all the necessary hardware to make a standard PC do this already (several times over). Raspberry Pi makes it cheap enough and powerful enough to do in a portable, low-power device using the same software, such that I don't need Arduino or have to start everything from scratch with new hardware. And that's why I've always just completely ignored Arduino - because of the price of even the initial setup.
Arduino is fine if you have money to burn or expertise and time to do lots of stuff yourself. Otherwise, give me Raspberry Pi and an ARM Linux repository and I could knock up the same project, quicker, for less, and even re-use it later on other hardware if necessary.
I was going to slap a Bluetooth dongle and maybe a 3G dongle on it (via a USB hub) and turn it into a car-GPS-monitoring system (like I've been trying to build for ages with a Mini-ITX system and never really enjoyed the hardware side of getting it to work / fit in a small case and run off the car sensibly).
The software is easy on Linux, the interfacing isn't too tricky, and being able to text your car and get its location for less than the price of the locked-in GPS monitoring devices I've seen sounds like a good idea (and if I can interface with it myself and have it do more fancy stuff at the car-end, even better - e.g. tie it in with an OBD-II reader, etc.).
I even saw an "SD Card RAID" device in my local electronics store - throw up to 4 SD cards in it and it appears as one USB drive. Was tempting to buy that just to store the GPS data on.
I work in a school but I can't see them buying into it seeing as its way behind even the staff's capabilities, but for tiny, low-power hobby projects it seems to have enough oomph to do things that larger computers or specialised electronics interfacing would normally be needed for. I'm a computer guy, not a circuit builder, and that - to me - seems to be the best use of it. Make a simple circuit and throw more processor power and a full OS at the job.
The nearest competitor for things like that is GumStix but they are expensive in comparison and have nowhere near the capability at the moment.
It costs less to create and assemble the full product elsewhere and send it to the EU/US than it would do to buy the parts in the EU/US or have it assembled in the EU/US.
There's a post on their blog about this exact issue with regards to tax. Components taxed, finished product untaxed, with regards to importing things from abroad.
And unless the difference was HUGE, it wouldn't be worth doing it even if you could - people would expect a reduced price if they are DIY, but you wouldn't be able to ONLY reduce it by as much as it costs to assemble (because that's literally pence on an assembly line in a factory doing them all day). You really want to DIY it for $0.50 cheaper than buying a finished product? The admin costs alone would make it less profitable already. Most of the cost is in the components.
This is pretty much why China makes 99% of the stuff we see in the shops. For crazy tax reasons, and the fact that they produce in bulk, quicker (did you not see that the UK production would take 2-3 months instead of 2-3 weeks?) and cheaper, it's easier to send designs to China, have them source components, assemble them, test them and ship them to EU/US than it ever would be to do even one part of the process in the EU/US.
If you don't believe me, have a look at the OpenPandora project - still about 2-3 years behind schedule and the price has rocketed because they didn't bother to keep tabs on a large US company they used (which resulted in higher costs, poor reliability, thousands of PCB's sitting idle and rottiing before they could be soldered, etc.) and they had to switch to Germany to finish off the very first batch still and things are *STILL* taking months. But the components from the Chinese companies they used have been available since day one (putting aside stupid project management issues like expecting a Chinese factory to make thousands of cables from a unique design after a 3-year wait with no word from the OP team, and expecting the same price to do so as you were quoted at the start).
Stupid idea that has a number of scams and will be a greater target for them (and just general theft).
1) Insert cardboard-box phone for photo. 2) When data cable arrives, plug into equivalent model. 3) Deposit cardboard box, walk away with cash. 4) Profit!
Who needs to insert stolen phones when the verificaiton will never be 100% accurate? What? Fraud? But the buyer saw and agreed to what they would buy! Caveat emptor!
Doing these sorts of things "human-less" is an incredibly stupid idea that's going to be rife with abuse. And, to be honest, the machine probably cost more to make than putting someone in a shopping centre or even the recycled-cost of the phones it will collect in a year.
People should stop trying to automate things just for the sake of it, especially with dumb ideas like this.
Lesson confirmed - antivirus is a waste of time and the equivalent of having a "known shoplifters" list specific to each store. Sure, some stores will share it, and you'll keep the regulars out, but there's no way you'll ever stop shoplifting via this method.
Measuring an antivirus (actually, "security suite") package by the performance of its runtime is kinda like measuring the effectiveness of a crane by its top-speed on the road, regardless of it only being able to life 1kg.
Or his browser and security settings don't let him run random malware served from a bog-standard compromised website.
I run Opera, I've yet to see it run a program from the net without my permission. Hell, I have to press play just to make Java/Flash things load because I switched on the option to do so.
Just because *you* are an arse that lets their computer auto-execute anything in a browser (and is subject to lots of known attack vectors over things like Javascript, etc.) doesn't mean the rest of us are.
A browser renders HTML and Javascript. Inside that scope, it's pretty hard to compromise a machine without using some seriously crappy code (i.e. a dodgy browser). Any decent security-conscious user would not be executing plugins of any kind by default or using an insecure browser and would, by that token, be incredibly unlikely to get any sort of infection even if they do browse sites that momentarily have infectious malware added to them (or, more likely, their ad networks, which should also be blocked from running Flash/Java if you have any brains).
Catching a virus is 99% user error and only about 1% software problems. Granted that 1% still exists but if you control the 99% (i.e. DON'T RUN THINGS FROM THE INTERNET) you can be pretty sure of a decently secure experience.
Signed,
A person who's been on the Internet for 15 years without AV and whose only infection came from a CD copy of a SiN game demo from a published magazine (and which was spotted instantly from unusual computer activity even if there was no "obvious" sign of infection) when I was a careless teenager.
Hell, where I work, people send me their infected USB keys for virus checking and data retrieval. If you use your brain, have a good OS, have good settings, turn off autorun and only interact with the files by command line (i.e. "attrib -r -s -h *", "del suspicious_file_x", etc.) then it's virtually impossible to get infected by that avenue, and many others.
And running an AV *scan* occasionally to verify cleanliness is very different to having something intercept every disk read/write, process execution, HTTP packet, etc. in order to keep you safe.
Hell, my "antivirus" is virustotal.com. If I see something dodgy, I know if it's malware and cleanse it myself as necessary, but if I'm just suspicious of something that seems innocent I upload it there and let them tell me if they know about it. I still don't blindly trust anything they verify as clean, but hell, you can't do much more to protect yourself than that (and, no, constant read-intercepts of everything on the disk is still a stupid idea that adds zero additional security).
Unfortunately, I can tell you the same story about any AV product out there, from personal experience.
Go to virustotal.com and upload any "known" virus you encounter and see how many big-name AV vendors don't recognise it at all.
Then make yourself a utility that crashes your system or takes over your startup entries, or does exactly what any virus will do and see how it fares against the same tests. I'd be very surprised if *any* of them picked it up, even with "heuristics" turned on.
Slashdot Mirror
How about:
I've never paid more than £1000 ($1500) for a car in my life, and they all give me at least 30,000 miles before dying and often that's after 100,000 miles of usage by other people? My maintenance costs are never more than about £500 ($750) over the year for any one particular car because if it costs that, it's cheaper to buy another car in the long run.
I have no more reliability or service issues than any other car driver (in fact, probably a lot less) and I don't really care if the car never starts again because I can replace it next month without having to budget specifically.
When I see second-hand electric cars that do the same, then we can talk. Your number 5 is going to make that nigh-on impossible for current models, whether you want to argue it or not.
Batteries of any kind do not last forever. Of those that last longest, lead-acid has proven the best value choice (and hence why the previous generation of all-electric cars in Britain - otherwise known as milk-floats - have been using them since the 60's) and that's the only battery in my current car and costs about £50 to replace when it dies. Your battery will never make it to any reasonable second-hand market, which means no-one will buy it, replacing it will be uneconomical (and the car will end up being recycled quicker) and you won't be able to recoup its cost. It also means that the second-hand market for electrics is dead before it starts until someone comes up with someone marvellous and hence lots of people (who have NEVER owned a new car) will never be able to use one.
Why buy something that's new and untested when you can wait a few years and get the same benefits at a cheaper purchase price? Give me a nudge when I can buy an electric car with 100,000 miles on the clock, a full service history, no major historical problems and no current mechanical problems. For a petrol car with the same criteria, they publish magazines full of nothing but the damn things being advertised.
I'd solve that problem in a second.
Try an amazing bit of software called "Don'tGoToThatFeckingWebsiteEverAgain".
(sarcasm mode off - seriously, why would you *want* to go to a website that treats its readers like that?)
But, again, the grammar actually isn't that bad. It's redundant, yes, but grammatically the errors are minor compared to the number of sins I've seen committed on here.
The original post was complaining that the summary wasn't readable. Aside from is/are and an extraneous 's', it's perfectly readable. Nobody said it was *interesting*, though.
It's not that bad. It really should say "are" instead of "is" but otherwise it's okay.
Unfortunately, those 3 countries were using their measurements long before the metric system even existed, and happen to control a vast portion of the world's GDP.
I agree they should put both measurements on but if you ask an Englishman how much he weighs, he'll tell you in stone. If you ask how tall he is, he'll tell you in feet. If you ask how fast he's going, he'll tell you in miles per hour. If you ask his penis size, he'll tell you in inches. It pretty much doesn't matter what generation he's from, that's the unit of measure he'll give you by default.
However, if he's a scientist who isn't writing an article for popular consumption, or he's a schoolchild in a class, he might give you metric *AS WELL* just to be clear.
Three feet to the yard (which is about a metre). Twelve inches to the foot. About 5/8 mph to the km/h. Seven furlongs in a mile. 112 pound to the hundredweight. 2,240 lb to the ton.
What could be simpler than that?
It doesn't apply to me. If the US block access to my site from the US, it doesn't affect me in the slightest. They could block access from the US to every site in my country as far as I'm concerned. Now, maybe it affects *someone* (I'm sure some companies would lose US import monies, but I'm equally sure the US would lose just as much in reverse), but until the EU even begin to consider similar laws that I get a say in, there's nothing I can do for you at all. I can agree with you or not. It makes no difference. Holding your service/data to ransom until you've rammed it down my throat doesn't help your cause.
So that's why *I've* complained about sites doing stupid SOPA blackouts - they've denied me access to content I want to see because of some political motive that I have no control over at all, and that I have to find ways to bypass. Sound much like SOPA itself?
Just because your country are doing something stupid doesn't mean that somehow involving me or assuming I'll just agree with you will make me feel strongly enough to take up your cause. SOPA is a stupid idea. But it's not MY stupid idea. And it won't affect me or my sites or my use of the Internet or my income in any way whatsoever.
In actual fact, the SOPA blackouts just made me find alternate sites and avenues to the content I would normally use. They actually *helped* me not be reliant on people who think their service is there to push their own political agenda instead of being a service. As soon as you "personalise" the service that much, I lose interest in it because it's more about personality and your beliefs than anything to do with the service they are providing.
Also, I don't need politics (especially foreign politics) spoon-fed to me by websites who assume I don't understand and that I'll just agree with them because they have inconvenienced me. Whether or not I do understand or even sympathise, that's one way to royally piss me off.
I equate the SOPA blackouts with the London Tube strikes - I may or may not agree with the underlying cause, but inconveniencing me and holding me to blackmail until I agree with you will make me NOT agree with you just out of principle. The DMCA was similarly fucking stupid, but nobody protested then and if you had, I'd have had the same opinion - I don't care because it doesn't affect me or my country, and I can't affect a foreign political system in any way (Fuck, I can barely affect my own!).
Sure, we have our own versions of some laws and THAT'S worth my interest but even people/sites/organisations in my own country trying to enforce their opinion on me through such actions is extremely counter-productive. I'm not stupid and, I'm afraid, I knew of ten times more important laws that got passed silently without any protest but I knew about them and they didn't get made public. Even those where people tried to make them public, the general populous had no concept of them and they were hidden in the news under celebrities being pregnant and politicians revealing details of their sex lives.
Publicity stunts to raise awareness are one thing but this is no more worth it than, say, the fact the US is still keeping prisoners in captivity without charge a decade after their arrest, in inhumane conditions and subjecting them to torture. SOPA, in comparison, is like preaching to a heart surgeon in the middle of an operation that hospital waiting rooms sometimes have chewing gum stuck to the bottom of their seats.
Don't shove your politics down my throat. And don't interrupt my productivity for the sake of "awareness" when I was aware of it before and am more concerned about a lot more important things than whether the US turns itself into a country like China. In some ways, it may do us all a favour if the US just forces itself off the net entirely by misusing these powers and making other countries build replacement, non-US, infrastructure.
Kodak invented the digital camera. They didn't capitalise it. Kodak digital cameras are almost unheard of and have been even since the early days. In Europe they had precisely zip of any percentage of the market at all (and Europe's a pretty big market to be missing out on). The only one I've *ever* seen in the flesh was an early 1.something MP one.
Strong sales of even one model does not a success make - they failed to get into the digital thing quickly enough to make a success, even if they invented it. It's not a research failure but a business failure.
Similarly for everything else - their name is spattered across lots of industry area but they failed to keep up to the point where they actually made money. I'm not suggesting the products aren't there - they aren't making money. Any idiot can be selling millions at pitiful profit margins enough to sink even the largest company, and that's what they did.
They also culled everything but film in their history, several times. Their R&D and technical capability was good. Their business sense was non-existent. Nobody heard of Kodak digital cameras or printers until they already had burned through a dozen from competitors.
Taking inspiration from Dungeons of Dredmor (with NH homage, I believe):
Suddenly the Dungeon Collapses
Achieved when you manage to crash the program.
That's a good rule for business, I like it.
Kodak died by not getting into the digital "thing" quickly enough and then doing poorly by the time they did. Same with Polaroid, really. Too stubborn to admit that their technology was coming to the end of an era and develop a replacement and instead letting their competitors (and even just random no-name companies at the time) do it for them.
At least they'll die having done almost nothing but film photography, so it looks like they just died as the industry for that died, rather than dragging the name through the dirt for decades trying to cling on to film's replacement.
I don't get attached to brands, but I do object to people running their businesses badly. The world's largest consumer of silver at one point - but totally failed to adapt when everyone stopped buying film. It's not a nice epitaph.
I grew up in and around London. I consider it a good night if I can see more than the Plough with the naked eye after ten minutes of standing and letting my eyes adjust.
My girlfriend (from a rural part of Italy) keeps on about showing me the Milky Way, meteorites and fireflies. I have honestly never seen any of them.
The only way to "see" more than a handful of the brightest stars near a city like that is to have a very sensitive camera and a "BULB" mode where you can do exposures of whatever length you need.
Or everyone will run their systems via a single machine that does firewalling, has a single address, blocks access to internal networks and provides VPN for those privileged users who still need it.
Because it's a LOT easier to separate the world into external/internal and handle the transition through something like an authenticated VPN than having everything potentially accessible and just waiting for the moment you slightly misconfigure the firewall (not to mention having to know that there are seventy machines you could connect to, or whether your particular machine is on/off, rather than just connecting to a well-named and advertised gateway). Hell, on IPv4 it's outgoing traffic that you spend most of your time discarding, rather than incoming, as desktops try to broadcast their presence to the world.
The point of a gateway is not just to act as some kind of IPv4 "fixer", but to simplify policy and addressing. IPv6 solves neither of those problems and certainly allocating a routable IP to everything imaginable (whether firewalled or not) is not something that's suddenly going to happen. For a start, your network admins will kill you and it will cause them headaches (i.e. instead of "I can't get on the VPN", you'll get "Someone's switched my computer off on the 23rd floor, could you just pop up....").
As said in another reply to yourself - you could do this with IPv4 if you thought ahead. The problem is that it doesn't save you anything when only one machine can act as the gateway to the network anyway - all you do is make the firewall config a lot harder (and have to play with it more as a result) whereas you could have just added a user to whatever VPN you liked or similar and EVERYONE in the company would instantly know the way to access the network (by connecting to vpn.example.com and not desktop25184.example.com).
NAT / Port-forwarding is certainly a hack, but it's not the reason to ditch IPv4 for IPv6 and there's always been ways around it. IPv6 deployments won't see any more publicly-routed traffic than previously.
What were you expecting to happen? IPv6 things will give you an IPv6 address and use it, and IPv4 things are unchanged. The majority of stuff is still IPv4-only and the only "surprising" thing is that the modem had a firmware that could handle it.
The problem is not what happens when you have modern OS, good ISP, simple configs, IPv4 fallback and modems that have IPv6-firmware for them but how you get to that point.
How do you upgrade servers and machines that aren't IPv6-enabled, how do you upgrade that old boiler software or access control software or internal wireless box to support things, how do you get an IPv6 address allocated to you on a business line, how do you make your servers accessible over both, how do you afford to replace all the things that can't be upgraded (for almost zero new "features"), how do you cope once IPv4 goes away completely, etc.?
None of them are huge obstacles with proper planning, support and finance but almost nothing is a huge obstacle with proper planning, support and finance. The problem is that an awful lot of people *won't* be able to upgrade as simply as you did.
It took ten minutes to IPv6 enable all my domains and servers and pass all the tests for them. But I still haven't managed to tunnel IPv6 into OpenVPN at my hosted server and use IPv6 natively from its allocated address. And tunnelling OpenVPN TO an IPv6 endpoint address still isn't possible as far as I can tell. My home connection is still IPv6-less, all my internal hardware uses only IPv4, etc. etc. but my laptop can connect to IPv6 networks no problem at all.
This is the problem with IPv6 - there is no one magic switch to throw. *Everything* has to be inspected, evaluated, upgraded, replaced, configured, etc. in order to work. And for what benefit? At the moment none. In a few years, every ISP will just have 4to6 tunnels by default anyway to let people still on old hardware carry on without upgrades. But a single, simple IPv6 deployment means nothing. My servers are IPv6 and so is my laptop. Trouble is, finding a sod in between that cares about it (what about your 3G provider, for instance?)
That's like saying that install.sh is named that way because of a filesystem limitation. It isn't.
RDP is a protocol with those exact initials. .text file in my life. .so
TXT, I'll give you but I've never seen a
Log - it's a word that means something on its own.
MSI, Microsoft Installer? This is midway between the first two.
DLL, it's a dynamic link library, no more different to a
There's a big difference between "named in a compatible way with 8.3 by accident" and "restricted to 8.3 because of its origin." Only a few files (.jpg, .htm) are actually called like that because of the limitation (and I've seen .jpeg and .html a lot in the wild) but most aren't (.png, .gif, .wmf, etc. for instance, which are the name of the format in its entirety).
Great. What does that mean for users?
Amateurs: Nothing at all.
"Know-a-bit's": Almost nothing.
Professional users: Nothing we couldn't do before.
State-of-the-art, top-dog, storage-gods: Nothing very special or new at all.
Now, if you'd said that it finally supported WinFS-style file tagging and searching, then you'd have ticked lots of boxes for all manner of users. As it is, it's a "slightly better filesystem than before" and hardly newsworthy (out of all your "features", I only spot one that you can't already do with Windows alone and that would ever be exposed to someone NOT using bit-level access to the drive - file level encryption).
I'm currently using Opera - Two windows and over 20 tabs open with different fully-loaded "big name" websites in all tabs. Some logged in, some not. Instant access to all my emails dating back to pre-2000 (with instant-narrow searching) covering some 5-6 Gb of email files on my profile (several POP and IMAP accounts all downloaded entirely to the Opera mail client) - which Opera stores as SQLite files, IIRC.
The same Opera session has been running for about 2 weeks straight, just suspend/resume as I take the laptop from work to home (and it's actually being used for about 16 hours a day for work and personal use, not sitting idle!)
Memory usage in Windows? 300Mb.
There's no reason for anything to use Gb's of memory internally. Sure, there's caching etc. but that *can* adjust to the memory left in the PC (i.e. on small PC's, ditch memory cache, on large PC's leave it in memory). Program use, though, loading on common websites even with tons of Javascript - there's no reason to use more than a few hundred megs or so.
And my Opera *FLIES* when switching tabs etc. and doesn't touch the disk at all. Granted that there are places you can have memory/speed trade-offs but a bog-standard application like a web browser isn't one of them. Read network, interpret, display, forget or remember when tab is closed depending on user preference. That's it. There's nothing complex there at all to suck up memory like Firefox can.
Ah, Slashdot. The only post-2000 website that can't understand Euro symbols or British pound-signs.
Nice that you live in a nice area. ;-)
My purpose would be a) security monitoring (I text the car, it tells me where it is), b) location awareness (car "knows" if it's moving and sends me a text), c) Finding my car in a strange town (I'm very forgetful and lost my car for over an hour once in Hannover).
Arduino GSM /GPRS / GPS-Shield: 126,05 â
optional GSM Antenna âoeAT-TG.09.0113â : 9,92 â
optional Power Supply: 8,40 â
Arduino GSM / GPRS / GPS-Shield â" Kit : 158,82 â
excl. VAT. plus Postage.
Not including the £/â 50 to buy an Arduino (and VAT is about 20% at the moment).
It would cost me less to buy a small netbook than it would to buy the shield on its own! Or five Raspberry Pi's. Or one Raspberry Pi, a bluetooth USB adaptor, a bluetooth GPS (dirt cheap, pound-store stuff now) and a 3G dongle (which places will throw at you now to get you out of the store) about 2-3 times over AT LEAST. Hence I could build three of these projects for the price of starting to build one with an Arduino.
This is my point. I have all the necessary hardware to make a standard PC do this already (several times over). Raspberry Pi makes it cheap enough and powerful enough to do in a portable, low-power device using the same software, such that I don't need Arduino or have to start everything from scratch with new hardware. And that's why I've always just completely ignored Arduino - because of the price of even the initial setup.
Arduino is fine if you have money to burn or expertise and time to do lots of stuff yourself. Otherwise, give me Raspberry Pi and an ARM Linux repository and I could knock up the same project, quicker, for less, and even re-use it later on other hardware if necessary.
I was going to slap a Bluetooth dongle and maybe a 3G dongle on it (via a USB hub) and turn it into a car-GPS-monitoring system (like I've been trying to build for ages with a Mini-ITX system and never really enjoyed the hardware side of getting it to work / fit in a small case and run off the car sensibly).
The software is easy on Linux, the interfacing isn't too tricky, and being able to text your car and get its location for less than the price of the locked-in GPS monitoring devices I've seen sounds like a good idea (and if I can interface with it myself and have it do more fancy stuff at the car-end, even better - e.g. tie it in with an OBD-II reader, etc.).
I even saw an "SD Card RAID" device in my local electronics store - throw up to 4 SD cards in it and it appears as one USB drive. Was tempting to buy that just to store the GPS data on.
I work in a school but I can't see them buying into it seeing as its way behind even the staff's capabilities, but for tiny, low-power hobby projects it seems to have enough oomph to do things that larger computers or specialised electronics interfacing would normally be needed for. I'm a computer guy, not a circuit builder, and that - to me - seems to be the best use of it. Make a simple circuit and throw more processor power and a full OS at the job.
The nearest competitor for things like that is GumStix but they are expensive in comparison and have nowhere near the capability at the moment.
I think you miss the point -
It costs less to create and assemble the full product elsewhere and send it to the EU/US than it would do to buy the parts in the EU/US or have it assembled in the EU/US.
There's a post on their blog about this exact issue with regards to tax. Components taxed, finished product untaxed, with regards to importing things from abroad.
And unless the difference was HUGE, it wouldn't be worth doing it even if you could - people would expect a reduced price if they are DIY, but you wouldn't be able to ONLY reduce it by as much as it costs to assemble (because that's literally pence on an assembly line in a factory doing them all day). You really want to DIY it for $0.50 cheaper than buying a finished product? The admin costs alone would make it less profitable already. Most of the cost is in the components.
This is pretty much why China makes 99% of the stuff we see in the shops. For crazy tax reasons, and the fact that they produce in bulk, quicker (did you not see that the UK production would take 2-3 months instead of 2-3 weeks?) and cheaper, it's easier to send designs to China, have them source components, assemble them, test them and ship them to EU/US than it ever would be to do even one part of the process in the EU/US.
If you don't believe me, have a look at the OpenPandora project - still about 2-3 years behind schedule and the price has rocketed because they didn't bother to keep tabs on a large US company they used (which resulted in higher costs, poor reliability, thousands of PCB's sitting idle and rottiing before they could be soldered, etc.) and they had to switch to Germany to finish off the very first batch still and things are *STILL* taking months. But the components from the Chinese companies they used have been available since day one (putting aside stupid project management issues like expecting a Chinese factory to make thousands of cables from a unique design after a 3-year wait with no word from the OP team, and expecting the same price to do so as you were quoted at the start).
Stupid idea that has a number of scams and will be a greater target for them (and just general theft).
1) Insert cardboard-box phone for photo.
2) When data cable arrives, plug into equivalent model.
3) Deposit cardboard box, walk away with cash.
4) Profit!
Who needs to insert stolen phones when the verificaiton will never be 100% accurate? What? Fraud? But the buyer saw and agreed to what they would buy! Caveat emptor!
Doing these sorts of things "human-less" is an incredibly stupid idea that's going to be rife with abuse. And, to be honest, the machine probably cost more to make than putting someone in a shopping centre or even the recycled-cost of the phones it will collect in a year.
People should stop trying to automate things just for the sake of it, especially with dumb ideas like this.
Lesson confirmed - antivirus is a waste of time and the equivalent of having a "known shoplifters" list specific to each store. Sure, some stores will share it, and you'll keep the regulars out, but there's no way you'll ever stop shoplifting via this method.
Measuring an antivirus (actually, "security suite") package by the performance of its runtime is kinda like measuring the effectiveness of a crane by its top-speed on the road, regardless of it only being able to life 1kg.
Or his browser and security settings don't let him run random malware served from a bog-standard compromised website.
I run Opera, I've yet to see it run a program from the net without my permission. Hell, I have to press play just to make Java/Flash things load because I switched on the option to do so.
Just because *you* are an arse that lets their computer auto-execute anything in a browser (and is subject to lots of known attack vectors over things like Javascript, etc.) doesn't mean the rest of us are.
A browser renders HTML and Javascript. Inside that scope, it's pretty hard to compromise a machine without using some seriously crappy code (i.e. a dodgy browser). Any decent security-conscious user would not be executing plugins of any kind by default or using an insecure browser and would, by that token, be incredibly unlikely to get any sort of infection even if they do browse sites that momentarily have infectious malware added to them (or, more likely, their ad networks, which should also be blocked from running Flash/Java if you have any brains).
Catching a virus is 99% user error and only about 1% software problems. Granted that 1% still exists but if you control the 99% (i.e. DON'T RUN THINGS FROM THE INTERNET) you can be pretty sure of a decently secure experience.
Signed,
A person who's been on the Internet for 15 years without AV and whose only infection came from a CD copy of a SiN game demo from a published magazine (and which was spotted instantly from unusual computer activity even if there was no "obvious" sign of infection) when I was a careless teenager.
Hell, where I work, people send me their infected USB keys for virus checking and data retrieval. If you use your brain, have a good OS, have good settings, turn off autorun and only interact with the files by command line (i.e. "attrib -r -s -h *", "del suspicious_file_x", etc.) then it's virtually impossible to get infected by that avenue, and many others.
And running an AV *scan* occasionally to verify cleanliness is very different to having something intercept every disk read/write, process execution, HTTP packet, etc. in order to keep you safe.
Hell, my "antivirus" is virustotal.com. If I see something dodgy, I know if it's malware and cleanse it myself as necessary, but if I'm just suspicious of something that seems innocent I upload it there and let them tell me if they know about it. I still don't blindly trust anything they verify as clean, but hell, you can't do much more to protect yourself than that (and, no, constant read-intercepts of everything on the disk is still a stupid idea that adds zero additional security).
Unfortunately, I can tell you the same story about any AV product out there, from personal experience.
Go to virustotal.com and upload any "known" virus you encounter and see how many big-name AV vendors don't recognise it at all.
Then make yourself a utility that crashes your system or takes over your startup entries, or does exactly what any virus will do and see how it fares against the same tests. I'd be very surprised if *any* of them picked it up, even with "heuristics" turned on.