Answer: Lots and lots of money spent on legal cases with uncertain outcomes.
This is part of the reason why people say we should have one road for human drivers and one for automated (which makes them so prohibitively expensive, it's not worth it). Basically if there's an accident, the human "driver" of the vehicle is responsible, whether he was on cruise control or his ABS failed or whatever. You can still have that but with automated cars, I foresee instant-law-suit as soon as something like that happens (in the style of the Toyota lawsuits) blaming the car.
And on an all-automated road, if you have an accident then it's *GOT* to be the automation fault, right? So you think that the car companies and road companies are going to pick up the tab for the first 50-car multiple pile-up? What about the associated traffic delays for a thousand people driving their automated cars just behind? Again, it gets prohibitively expensive and risky for the car/road companies to operate.
If you have an automated car on a "human" road, then the human has to be able to take over (seeing as he is the one responsible in case of a crash!), so it becomes a little bit like cruise control and also becomes 100% the driver's problem, even if the automation fails.
More interesting - can you get arrested for something like "driving without due care and attention" if you're the driver of an automated vehicle and do something behind the wheel? If so (and current laws say "YES!"), you might as well just drive the damn thing yourself.
It's pretty much why these things are university projects and not actually on the road except in "tests" (and also things like the demonstration of two "crash-proof automated Volvo's a couple of months ago that, when aimed at each other head on at 30mph were supposed to stop before any possible accident - in front of the press they crashed about a dozen times and stopped once).
We've had the capability to remote-control and computer control a car for YEARS. Hell, we do it with aeroplanes and oil-tankers. But the fact of the matter is that we ALWAYS have a responsible human behind the wheel with the control to take over and, if they take their eyes off the controls, are deemed to be irresponsible (imagine if your airline pilot and his co-pilot both went to sleep and left it on auto?). The problem is that the law, economics and common-sense tell us it's a stupid thing to do.
You want an automated vehicle? Get on the London Docklands Light Railway. Entirely driver-less. But they had to put conductors on the trains to reassure passengers because occasionally the things get stuck and go wrong even though they are on rails. "a Passenger Service Agent (PSA), originally referred to as a "Train Captain", on each train is responsible for patrolling the train, checking tickets, making announcements and controlling the doors. PSAs can also take control of the train in certain circumstances including equipment failure and emergencies." Been in operation since 1987, can only travel on the rails, can't go past their stated safe speed, and you can have actual physical objects on the rails that activate brakes to avoid collisions and STILL they have a "driver".
Automated cars are like the "flying cars" of science fiction - yeah, it'd be cool, and we probably have the technology - but do you really want joy-riders flying over your house?
If God wanted man to fly, he'd have given him wings. If God wanted man to travel outside the planet, he'd have given him the ability to breath in space. If God wanted man to live through a heart attack, he'd have given him an internal defibrillator. If God wanted man to travel the oceans, he'd have given him flippers.
Seems to me that what "God wants" is an inherently outdated list of things that we deliberately break, through choice, every day.
Basically, if "God wants" me to do something, chances are I'm not going to do it - not out of some inherent disobedience but because doing those things is SENSIBLE and pushes the human race forward.
The problem I have with such dystopic predictions is this:
Assuming
- grid electricity is gone - tons of hardware that needs it is still lying around; okay some may be damaged or unusable (EMP blast), need to connect to servers, etc. but the majority of it WOULD be fully working (and most data-centers would be mostly intact, if not connected externally, even in the case of nuclear blast).
You're seriously telling me that NOT ONE PERSON knows how to, say, charge a set of AA's without using the national grid? That no-one has tiny solar chargers and radios? That no-one has a car battery and/or engine (fuel is another matter but with the engine components you can certainly make a generator from any rotational motion).
Hell, we were able to do things like that in the 17th/18th centuries with ZERO knowledge of electricity even existing as a source of energy or what it was at all. And you can read data off chips with an LED and a battery if need be - not fast, not fun, but similar things are done every day in the emulation ROM-recovery fields.
Hell, give me a couple of copper cables and a couple of household chemicals and I can charge a battery for you - it won't be pretty or efficient but it'll work. The Egyptians were doing it BC, for instance.
You could argue that the knowledge of electricity would be lost if enough people died but damn, you'd have more to worry about than reading Shakespeare if that's the case - food for a start would be something that if you didn't start sorting out in the first few days, and doing it well, would mean you'd have nothing to after a month or so (do you know how to farm wheat etc. on an scale big enough to feed your extended family year-round?).
Paperbacks are inherently more susceptible - solid state and magnetic storage is pretty damn hard to destroy on a national scale , but paper? It burns very nicely, thank you, and has done on nation-wide scales in the past. Not to mention the way it ages. Not to mention rotting. Not to mention fungus, water, staining, or even just plain old falling out of the binding.
Paper has advantages but has just as many disadvantages as electronics. And worrying about Shakespeare's sonnets at that moment would be pointless - for a start, your entire countries food and transport networks would be down. You'd be lucky to survive the month if you live in a crowded city.
Speaking as someone from the DOS-era, I can say that I never owned most of those - I had a 3DFX at one point but I can't think of a single game that NEEDS it that doesn't have a modern port, or isn't able to brute-force it, or doesn't work with the myriad Glide wrappers and the various DosBox patches for that. And seriously - Virge? That was like saying "ATI Rage" - never did I see a "real" 3D game run as anything faster than a stunned sloth with either of those.
I don't think most people had that sort of stuff and those that did played only a handful of mainstream titles with support for them - most of which HAD to work absolutely fine by brute-force without them because otherwise no-one would buy it. That sort of stuff came at the end of the DOS gaming era for most people, and so it would be suitably ironic for me to call you a "newb" in those sorts of gaming if that's what you're most worried about.
The only games from my DOS day that I *know* I would have benefited back-in-the-day from my 3DFX were Quake (the reason we bought the 3DFX in the first place, having seen it run on faster machines without 3D acceleration) and the original GTA. Quake is so much ported and improved now it's unbelievable and GTA had a DirectX version in the same box (and could brute-force in software mode on any vaguely modern machine without problems).
DOS games weren't about 3D, except for a tiny handful of big "eye-candy" titles towards the end of the DOS-era, so you yourself have missed the point here. And to be honest, even with the original disks, boxes and manuals to hand a lot of stuff doesn't run any more and needs to be patched, etc. to run even in an emulator. My original disk of F29-Retaliator? Dead. And I only vaguely remember just trying 7F, 7F, 7F each time as the co-ordinate on the copy-protection because it was quicker than reading through the manual for the proper co-ord. It also HAD to be run in C:\RETAL or it would just crash, errorless, back to DOS.
Modern "DOSBox" version that I run? Ironically from an abandonware site that has a version that works in any folder and takes any input on the copy-protection screen. It was worth the download just to avoid all that crap, and would have been even back-in-the-day, (I remember hacking assembler to clear Desert Strike's and Worms' CD-ROM checking code, for instance) and I *HAVE* the manual, disks etc. still. Preservation? That's a different task to wanting to enjoy old favourites, like the difference between enjoying an aged wine and keeping a 400-year-old bottle that's undrinkable.
In the old days, people would buy used because it was cheaper for them, and then the profit from that would go to an independent retailer.
Now, people can't buy used (not for most PC games anyway), so they will buy *new* only if the price is the same as used, and then the profit will go to the original producers.
It's the gaming industry's choice - keep prices how they are and expect lost used sales and/or lost overall sales (because people will want to pay less for something they can't sell on again later), or lower prices overall, or very quickly after release, so that you destroy the used sales market and reap their profit instead.
Either way, the used sales market will die (I would argue that it's already dead for PC, but console is still alive and well). But customers aren't suddenly going to start spending more money than they already do. If you are expecting them to pay more for their games overall, you're probably in for a shock and will see huge drops in sales. But if you drop to a decent price and, like you've able to do for DECADES, make used games sales unattractive, then you could take a share of profits that they used to enjoy instead.
I've started to see this on Steam - some big-name games are going to silly prices quite soon after launch. But it's still not really emerging enough.
It's simple. People allocate X% of their income to games and other entertainment luxuries. You can try to do business in a way that copes with that (i.e. stealing more of that X% than you normally would by taking over from the used sales yourself) or you can try to pretend that people will pay more and more and more over and above natural growth just because you asked for it and the game's been hyped in the press. To me, one's a good business strategy and the other's the sort of thing an eight-year-old says (and your primary gaming market now is 18-30, if not older, not children).
I don't think I've ever bought many games used anyway. I certainly can't remember doing so despite owning many computers and consoles since the ZX Spectrum. All my Spectrum games were new (most were budget because I was a child!). All my Nintendo console games were new, from the Gameboy to the Wii. 99% of my PC purchases were new. Before Steam, I used to buy old DOS titles on eBay but literally that was about the same time as they were either being made freeware (e.g. C&C) or becoming unavailable (and most of which you STILL can't buy on any of the digital download services). I now have several of those old games on Steam anyway, where I basically paid a pittance for not having to faff about with DosBox!
Used games are dead. You can either suck up their slack by pricing effectively, or you can convince yourself that in times when people can't afford to get to work (if they're lucky enough to have a job), they'll be splashing out more on games just because they are "new" and pretty. To somehow compare it to piracy (which IS also a problem exacerbated by pricing policies, a cause of huge - and wasteful - DRM investment, but one which you'll never eradicate) is ridiculous.
Sort your pricing out, and the used market won't be an issue - it will be YOURS.
Yeah, it's hard to find sympathy when that £10,000 tiny family car is for sale for a few hundred within a few years, normally as soon as it needs a full test to stay on the road.
My car is 15 years old. I bought it with 30,000 miles for £350. Since then it's done that over again (and a half) without trouble. God knows what was paid for it originally, but it depreciated faster than a house in Fukushima. And then they wonder why I don't want to pay £179 a month for five or so years, and have to pay a huge deposit and a huge final balance (or lose the car, even after 5 years of payments!) to drive something that's new and untested and has expensive parts and unknown problems and costs a fortune to insure, repair and replace.
I have about as much sympathy for games developers who are "stung" by used-game sales as I do for car manufacturers whose products depreciate to the cost of metal in the car within a handful of years.
You've put your finger on every problem I have with "AI", genetic algorithms, neural networks etc.
They basically consist of "let's throw this onto a machine and see what happens", which doesn't sound like computer science at all (I'm not saying that computer science doesn't involve bits of this, but that's not the main emphasis). It seems that an easy way to get research grants from big IT companies is to slap some cheap tech on a robot and "see what it does".
Here, they have a more interesting problem than trying to recognise shapes, or trying to get "birdbots" to flock, etc. and yet they've clearly missed the opportunity to do some research rather than throw the problems at the robots and see what happens.
I've no doubt that there are some people out there doing real work but they are tarred with the same brush as those students that slap a webcam and an actuator in a car and claim it "drives itself" because they just kept edge-finding the images and then tweaking the settings until the tolerances were okay for most things.
If you can't back up what you're doing with a decent prediction, hypothesis, test, results, conclusion, options for further study, etc. then it's not computer science - it's just "computing" or, to put it another way, pissing about with expensive hardware because you have access to it.
Hell, Roomba was a single practical application of such things and even that's a bit ropey and *WAY* out of most people's price ranges and, actually, not that good compared to doing the hoovering yourself.
I have to agree. Where's my Gnu Call software to replace Skype now that there's a massive impetus to move away from MS-owned Skype? We already have all the components in place and it's a "high priority" thing for the FSF apparently but yet - nothing. SIPWitch has been around since 2008 in 0.0000000.0.000.001 releases and there's no sight of how it will replace a Windows binary, how it will become as ubiquitous as they want it to, how well it actually works when scaled up, there's no push to use it or test it or hack on it etc.
I've always considered the FSF "the petition kid". They like to stand up and shout whenever they see an injustice but, overall, they don't get much done towards showing a better way. Most GNU projects, with the exception of a handful of "huge" projects like gcc, are on the backburners most of the time - hell, the one that pretty much started it all (HURD) "is still some way from being ready for daily use". I always worry when a project I need is on http://savannah.gnu.org/ because my experience is that most things on there tend to die quicker than they would elsewhere.
Want to impress me, FSF? Stop faffing about moaning about idiots who voluntarily sign away their lives without checking, and concentrate on a couple of your main core and high-priority projects that are sadly neglected (or even in some cases non-existent).
Most EU countries have VAT which amounts to a (different in every country but currently in the UK:) 20% tax on all sales except essentials (baby milks, children's clothing, most foods - but not "luxury" foods with chocolate in them, etc. - and, strangely, printed books).
Yet we still have high tax rates too, and it's not because we're being "stung" any more than other countries.
Hell, some EU countries just charge you 50% of whatever you earn which actually works out quite a good deal when you take into account all the tiny taxes and administrative costs of them over a lifetime. It makes taxes SO much simpler and you can actually spend time chasing those who cheat the system rather than having to need a degree in law and mathematics to understand taxation enough to tell whether something is right or not.
The UK has a tax mess too - and we really should go the blanket 50% way (although if we were to do it properly, it would be nearer the 60-something % that we're currently paying) - we have fuel tax, road tax, "tv licensing", income tax, VAT, land tax, house-buying tax, cigarette tax, alcohol tax, corporation tax, national insurance contributions, gambling tax, air passenger tax, insurance premium tax, inheritance tax, council tax, and a million others, all on sliding scales and requiring all sorts of legal basis and challenges (McVities were sued by HM Customs and Excise for classing a Jaffa Cake as a cake - untaxable - and not a luxury biscuit - taxable. The lawsuit cost millions.)
Whereas if you just said "any money or goods you earn or are given as a gift/inheritance, we want 50%", it's very easy to work out. Hell, most of the time it's almost impossible to work out what you need to pay. Self-employed people fill out a tax return and if they *don't* want to calculate their own tax, they have to send it in 6 months before those who do with the relevant data so someone else can work it out for you. And that's AFTER you've made sure to legally declare everything and put it in the right boxes and ask for the right forms.
Summary says: "The newest version of the malware exhibits some behavior that researchers haven't seen before"
The article says: "In 1999, a new virus, Win32/Crypto, was discovered... Today, in 2011, variants of Win32/Alureon are bringing this old-school technique back to life... Another interesting tidbit is that an initial version of this obfuscator first arrived in our lab in the first half of 2009."
That's kinda stretching the definition of "haven't seen before", which may be true in a technical sense (because they haven't seen THIS EXACT MALWARE before, but they've certainly seen lots like it).
If I didn't filter, I'd have to wade through all the junk that I *know* isn't true, and give equal time to dealing with creationists and evolutionists. If I filter, I can get rid of the cranks and crackpots and get down to what I want to find.
The prevailing principle here is that people will only find what they are looking for. If you're looking for vague assertions that backup your case, you'll find them. If you're looking for facts that backup your case, you stand a high chance of finding them. But if you're just looking for all the raw data and facts, you'll find them too, and can make up your own mind.
Of course there will be people who only see the data / opinions they want to see. That's their problem, not the world's (except in the context of giving them a metaphorical slap and telling them to grow up) and not their filters.
I recently introduced my 2-year-old daughter to one of her grandparents (who lives 800 miles away). He has a reputation for zaniness and within minutes she'd learned that when he said he was going to steal all her toys, or that he was taking her off to live on an oil rig in the middle of the sea, it was best to ignore him and carry on as normal. She filtered. Without that filter, the distress of the early stages of meeting him would have continued forever. But she still knew when he was actually serious about, say, giving her some chocolate and when he was playing about. The filter is there to do just that - filter the things you don't want to hear or don't care about or don't believe out.
You'll only have an insular existence if that's what you WANT to have.
I have to say - paying to receive SMS is possibly the most stupid thing I've ever heard anyone agree to. It was back when mobile phones first came out and still is now.
The problem is not Facebook there - the problem is people who tolerate a stupid system where you can end up paying for something you never asked for.
IE certainly did but they give that away for free and its still losing marketshare every day.
But Office? I think they wrote most of that themselves, though no doubt they used some libraries and contributions from various places they took over, I think we have to say that Office is "theirs".
From what I see, most of their acquisitions turn out to be dumb ideas, either for MS or the people getting taken over. I made a list on the The Register of some of the software they got via takeovers and most of it was stuff that I abandoned at almost exactly the same time, even if I didn't know it was an MS product by then.
OpenOffice was open-source. As such it still exists elsewhere and (I don't think it's harsh to say) the original OO, from the community, to download numbers to feature support, is dead.
Skype is closed-source. There isn't any way that it could continue without the owner's support.
You can only "wipe out" something that isn't open-source. Most of Linux, and most of the "big apps" on Linux are open-source, and hence have been pretty immortal up until now.
Dropbox isn't open-source (from the server side). Thus it's just as likely to die a death, like any "cloud" faddy thing around today.
All those people who rely on closed-source things should have noticed a pattern by now. OO "dies", LO "is born". The "official" Java dies, they are already alternatives. Netscape "dies" and things like Mozilla carry on.
I wouldn't bet on Skype being "the" video tool in a year's time. In fact, I probably wouldn't bet on it still existing in a recognisable form.
Previous history teaches us to be wary. Fool me once, and all that.
The point is that if you've been reliant on an awful lot of things that MS has bought out in the past, you've come unstuck - usually not long after they bought it out. I put a list on The Register already and I can't be bothered to go find it and paste it back in.
And even if true, then the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Watch what MS do. Based on past personal history, I predict that a lot of people who *aren't* complaining and currently *using* Skype won't be using it in the future. You can prove me wrong (for the first time ever, when it comes to MS) in a year's time if that's not the case.
You honestly think that MS are going to continue the Android version of Skype, for instance? That they won't fight tooth-and-nail to stop third-party clients using the Skype network without be "authorised" by MS? That somehow they'll be nice as pie to all those MacOS and Linux users they have currently? You seem to be suggesting that they could even enhance the service.
And, like everyone who's worked in IT for a while and seen how MS has behaved historically, I don't believe it and even if they turn it into the most wonderful, open service in the world, they STILL have a lot of making up until I start to trust their intentions by default.
Retards for having a principle and not wanting to *risk* getting stung? I'm a retard then. A professional one in fact. Strangely, I'm not even using Linux on the desktop either. You don't have to be a fanboi to worry about getting stung, and you don't have to be one to not trust someone's intentions based on past behaviour.
I still have Skype installed. But every update from now will be installed retrospectively once other guinea pigs have a chance to tell me what they changed. And I'm actually researching current alternatives - I'm hoping this might be the impetus needed to forge a decent, ubiquitous, cross-platform and open-source alternative. While Skype was doing what people wanted, there was no need for an alternative - now I, and many others, are looking for one - just in case.
So your desktops are all 100Mbps (which, you're right, is more than adequate for general use).
So the switch they plug into has to have a 1Gb backbone (usually one per 12-16 clients for office-type stuff, or else you hit bottlenecks when everyone is online - but for everyone to have "true" 100Mb, you need a 1Gb line per 8-or-so clients).
Those 1Gb backbones (usually muliple) then have to daisy-chain throughout your site (and thus if your total combined usage is over 1Gb in any one direction, you're stuffed) OR you can give them multiple 1Gb lines or (in the future) a 10Gb line as backbone.
A 24-port 10/100 with 2 port 10Gb will be a killer product when it emerges, is standardised, and cheap enough. Hell, I could use it NOW.
The school I work in has a central database run from two bonded 1Gb connections on the server. I think the school would pay even today's prices for 10Gb if it was standardised and ubiquitous enough to be on servers and switches by default. That's a school with 150 machines, most of which can't even go on the database anyway (about 25 do) - hardly a huge demand or unusual circumstances.
We'd certainly pay for 10Gb ports on the servers and a single 10Gb port on a switch that we then load up with 10/100 and Gigabit connections to ensure the best throughput for those ports. That's for a quite-small database - we don't do video-streaming or anything heavy over that connection.
The Internet connection? Yeah, we only have 2 x 24Mbps anyway, so it's no use for that. But internal connections often shift a hell of a lot more data (how much data do you think is transferred if you do PXE booting, or centralised file/application storage on servers, etc.?). 10Gb should be available today - it's taking too long. 100Gb is around the corner and could be in every school in 10 years or so, especially with the push towards video-streaming/caching, etc.
It's hardly rocket-science type uses that apply here. An ordinary school could make good use of 10Gb today and even is beginning to have a *need* for it.
Really? I use Opera, with "Accept cookies only from the site I visited" set to on (which is the default) and have never run into a problem with this.
What sites specifically? Because I have *zero* cookies from either of those sites you mentioned and yet don't have a problem navigating any of what I would consider the major sites - the only sites that give me problems are ones where they don't have Opera compatibility at all, I can't even remember the last time I had a cookie issue (maybe with the inbuilt Steam browser not staying logged into Steam community - but I can't even *see* the cookie settings for that).
I've refused every offer of training ever given to me. After leaving uni, I was an independent technician for 10 years - roaming from place to place with year-long contracts with various schools (up to 8 simultaneously, on a sort of shift rota). The longest-term ones had me there for 8-9 of those years consecutively because they liked my work, and even poached me from an employer (at great expense) and hired me full-time for 2 years at the end (I left because of internal politics which I hadn't been subjected to previously). I did everything from managing their finance servers to writing new programs.
They never had a problem with my work, but they were nice enough to offer me training to advance myself. I refused. Why? Because they couldn't find a course suitable.
The problem with IT training is that it's generally aimed at people new to the industry. Even when you get into the £2000/day training courses, it's Powerpoint slideshows and "let's all try that now, shall we?" from someone who's never been in a professional position except "trainer", and on material that you could teach *them* more about than they could teach you. Don't even get me started on the mainstream junk (e.g. MCSE, etc.). Learning menu positions, control panel icons, how to use the MMC etc. by rote isn't learning.
Every training on a "new technology" would have me sleeping within 30 minutes. When your training could be surpassed by a 1-page crib sheet written by someone at the same level as the participants, you know the training is a waste of time. And if you attend training and find yourself in a room with more than 20% of people with pen-and-paper on their lap, religiously scribbling down every click they see, do yourself a favour and leave.
And precisely how many of my employers have ever been bothered by the amount of professional training I have? Zero. They don't even ask, because I was making a career of it (at my own personal financial risk) before they'd even heard of the various certifications (or, in some cases, used a computer). How many were dissatisfied with my work? Zero.
Amusingly, one employer wanted me to take the ECDL just so they could say all their staff had it. The look they got was enough to have them backing out of the room in silence.
IT Training, from my point of view, is currently a complete waste of time. It's an excuse for a jolly-up, disguised in a £2000/day invoice. And if someone needs to be *professionally* trained to do their job - you hired the wrong person. You can do little one-day seminars on certain topics (e.g. legal implications of new data protection laws, etc.) but to actually think that you need to keep training your IT staff to keep them working at the right level? That's ludicrous. Also, I wouldn't expect them to PAY to train themselves either, that's just silly.
Just give them 5-10% of their day on side-projects. Mention that the company will be wanting you to be able to do X within a year, and they'll use that time to train themselves up. You're "paying" for it, because it comes out of their work-time. You're not paying over-the-odds or floating a crappy here-today-gone-tomorrow "training" company. And within a year, they'll have grasped whatever concepts they need to (and if they haven't - that's the sign of a lazy worker, because they were pre-informed). If it's a massive job, they'll ask for materials and/or support and before you know it you have a trainer, and complete training materials, in-house for the rest of your staff.
It works fabulously from the lowest ranks ("We're *going* to be moving to this new telephone system - I'll put your new phone here, here's a brief intro, you'll have your old system and phone up until the end of the year but we *will* be switching then to the new system - get used to it" - replace phone with software, PC, input device, whatever) to the most skilled ("Next year, we're going to move *everything* to SAP - do you know SAP? No - well, no problem, we have a year and
They "support" it now. So do Intel. The problem is not that the processor or even chipset supports it but that the bundled BIOS *IS* coreboot, which is unlikely.
And even then, every tweak made by a motherboard manufacturer has to be taken account of. It's like saying the AMD "supports" running Linux on it. Course it does, but it doesn't mean that the computer can actually run Linux usefully (Argh! Flashback to the days when a lot machines *couldn't* get basic support under Linux working without patching an tweaking).
It's a step forward but hardly worth shouting about - when Foxconn, MSI, etc. get on board, then you have a deal. Until then, it's like saying that my computer support FireWire. It does. It just doesn't have any FireWire ports, and I haven't installed the drivers for them on any OS.
Says who? Isn't that a fact that could only be established in a trial? Where's the evidence that he ordered any of this, rather than just claimed responsibility for it on a couple of videos, or even coerced into being the scapegoat while the true culprit gets clean away (every time I've ever seen a bombing, some nutter, somewhere has taken responsibility for it even if they didn't do it - it's a known factor in confessions, etc. - some people just claim responsibility for things). At which point did he receive a trial to determine the facts (and, come on, the US is one of the few countries left where you could fast-track him to execution if you so wanted after finding him guilty)?
Was the US at war with HIM personally, or the country he resided in? Can a country be at war with a concept (terrorism, drug-abuse, etc.)? Can a country be at war with a single person, and thus see his killing as a simple "act of war"? Isn't that just an excuse for justifying assassination, which is actually NOT allowed under US law (and hence the UK has been doing that kind of dirty work for the US for a long time because we don't have a law against that)?
If the US was at war with Pakistan at the time (nope, they're supposed to be allies at the moment!), then possibly you could see how his killing could be merely the casualty of war but how does that fit with him being specifically targeted and specifically assassinated?
What if, say, Julian Assange does something the US disagree with? Can you "declare war" on him? Can you bomb any country he's in to kingdom come? Can you (legally) send out a team of SEAL's to a foreign country to put a bullet in his head? What about if he claimed to have some national-security information that you killed him for but actually never did - does that justify an assassination? What about if the local nutter claims responsibility for 9/11, can you shoot him too without trial?
As to being "too risky" to capture - you had him. You had him, in a room, surrounded by your people with guns, and no actual resistance that was a threat. You extracted those same SEAL's, so you could have extracted him too. Hell, you extracted his body to a warship, apparently, for burial. If you can prove he reached for a gun, even the police would have shot him, let alone the army, but there's no evidence he did.
If he had explosives on him - your SEAL's shot him dead and would have instantly triggered any dead-man's switch while standing in the same room as him. Or maybe even hit the explosives with bullets themselves. That would make them pillocks and make such a mission incredibly stupid if you even suspected that. I would like to think that they KNEW there wasn't anything explosive in the house that posed a threat beforehand.
There's a simple way to prove to countries that you're superior to terrorism - and it doesn't involve trying to "terrorise" the terrorists, everyone associated with them, every country they go near, torturing innocents in foreign prisons with STILL no hope of trial/release yet, and bombing foreign countries for TEN YEARS. It involves capturing those you think are responsible and showing the world that you're BETTER than them - by giving them a humane trial (like we did with virtually EVERY captured dictator, Nazi, etc. that we believed may have committed war crimes of much vaster proportions than one bomb on one building - and at least their crimes were in the middle of a real fecking war!), giving them a chance to justify their actions and THEN acting (even if that decision involves execution).
Tell me - why does Saddam Hussein get this treatment: "Captured on 13 December 2003, Saddam was brought to trial under the Iraqi interim government. On 5 November 2006, he was convicted of charges related to the 1982 killing of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites and was sentenced to death by hanging." whereas Osama Bin Laden got a bullet in the head and zero evidence?
Expense of a trial? Do you have any idea how much t
I work in schools (i.e. limited budget). It's just not sensible or practical to have ANY of that stuff running Wifi, especially in solid-build buildings, near residential areas, or anywhere you need something to STAY connected.
We have HVAC controls - on a Cat5 outlet that we put in specially. The electrician ran it in with the electrical outlets and the AC engineers run it with their cabling happily too - for the price of the cable / box and a little extra labour.
We have a printer in every room. Usually wired to the same Cat5 outlet as the main computer outlet.
We have door-controls - same thing. All over Cat5/IP, even down to the individual door activators and swipe-card sensors.
We have VoIP - same thing. If there isn't a socket where we need it, Cat5 goes in for no more than a phone line of the same length / distance.
We have CCTV - all wired to Cat5 sockets rather than with Coax back to a central point because that would mean more unnecessary cabling when the Cat5 does the job and STILL supplies Gigabit Ethernet to several other devices on the same point.
And then eventually you realise - after a while, in any large building, you still always have a Cat5 point within 100m (usually within 10m) and from there you can do everything you need to split it / put a switch in and join even more stuff to the normal network.
Cat5 is a universal deployment that virtually everything can use once plugged in and can be extended to ridiculous means (i.e. Gigabit to every outlet, so you CAN stream multiple CCTV channels from the other end of the building without having to worry about the wireless bandwidth / interference in between and/or knocking out other systems).
Whereas our wireless deployments? In the middle of a residential area, we can't get more than 8 machines into a room reliably using Wifi - even with flooding 3 channels full from school AP's - ( and where reliability means "can login via LDAP without having to constantly retry") because of the interference and up/down-ness of it all - training days we only use switches and hard cables now.
What we do expose to Wifi can be picked up miles away if you want to but can't be used reliably on the other side of the room. Wireless CCTV interferes like hell and knocks out both itself and the Wifi and other 2.4GHz gadgets.
Yet with wired cabling we can cover the entire building with the minimum of fuss. Diagnosis is simple (green light on switch = working). Things don't change over time. We can have redundant and even circular links. We don't drown out our neighbours.
It costs LESS than the Wifi crap - hell a run of Cat5 to the maximum run (with installation costs and sockets) costs less than a single access point (without installation costs) if you have decent contractors that aren't conning you. If you have in-house staff, you also save the "profit" that you would have given the contractor.
Copper cabling saves you so much more hassle and time and money and effort and extraneous costs, if you're being charged sensible prices, and stays that way pretty much forever - use your brain and install Cat6a now and you're save until each outlet needs more than 10Gb/s. Install wifi now and for MORE cost, you get LESS service, LESS reliability and in before you even get to 200MB/s you're going to be replacing them ALL.
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Answer: Lots and lots of money spent on legal cases with uncertain outcomes.
This is part of the reason why people say we should have one road for human drivers and one for automated (which makes them so prohibitively expensive, it's not worth it). Basically if there's an accident, the human "driver" of the vehicle is responsible, whether he was on cruise control or his ABS failed or whatever. You can still have that but with automated cars, I foresee instant-law-suit as soon as something like that happens (in the style of the Toyota lawsuits) blaming the car.
And on an all-automated road, if you have an accident then it's *GOT* to be the automation fault, right? So you think that the car companies and road companies are going to pick up the tab for the first 50-car multiple pile-up? What about the associated traffic delays for a thousand people driving their automated cars just behind? Again, it gets prohibitively expensive and risky for the car/road companies to operate.
If you have an automated car on a "human" road, then the human has to be able to take over (seeing as he is the one responsible in case of a crash!), so it becomes a little bit like cruise control and also becomes 100% the driver's problem, even if the automation fails.
More interesting - can you get arrested for something like "driving without due care and attention" if you're the driver of an automated vehicle and do something behind the wheel? If so (and current laws say "YES!"), you might as well just drive the damn thing yourself.
It's pretty much why these things are university projects and not actually on the road except in "tests" (and also things like the demonstration of two "crash-proof automated Volvo's a couple of months ago that, when aimed at each other head on at 30mph were supposed to stop before any possible accident - in front of the press they crashed about a dozen times and stopped once).
We've had the capability to remote-control and computer control a car for YEARS. Hell, we do it with aeroplanes and oil-tankers. But the fact of the matter is that we ALWAYS have a responsible human behind the wheel with the control to take over and, if they take their eyes off the controls, are deemed to be irresponsible (imagine if your airline pilot and his co-pilot both went to sleep and left it on auto?). The problem is that the law, economics and common-sense tell us it's a stupid thing to do.
You want an automated vehicle? Get on the London Docklands Light Railway. Entirely driver-less. But they had to put conductors on the trains to reassure passengers because occasionally the things get stuck and go wrong even though they are on rails. "a Passenger Service Agent (PSA), originally referred to as a "Train Captain", on each train is responsible for patrolling the train, checking tickets, making announcements and controlling the doors. PSAs can also take control of the train in certain circumstances including equipment failure and emergencies." Been in operation since 1987, can only travel on the rails, can't go past their stated safe speed, and you can have actual physical objects on the rails that activate brakes to avoid collisions and STILL they have a "driver".
Automated cars are like the "flying cars" of science fiction - yeah, it'd be cool, and we probably have the technology - but do you really want joy-riders flying over your house?
An infinitely complex sender/receiver apparatus?
If God wanted man to fly, he'd have given him wings.
If God wanted man to travel outside the planet, he'd have given him the ability to breath in space.
If God wanted man to live through a heart attack, he'd have given him an internal defibrillator.
If God wanted man to travel the oceans, he'd have given him flippers.
Seems to me that what "God wants" is an inherently outdated list of things that we deliberately break, through choice, every day.
Basically, if "God wants" me to do something, chances are I'm not going to do it - not out of some inherent disobedience but because doing those things is SENSIBLE and pushes the human race forward.
The problem I have with such dystopic predictions is this:
Assuming
- grid electricity is gone
- tons of hardware that needs it is still lying around; okay some may be damaged or unusable (EMP blast), need to connect to servers, etc. but the majority of it WOULD be fully working (and most data-centers would be mostly intact, if not connected externally, even in the case of nuclear blast).
You're seriously telling me that NOT ONE PERSON knows how to, say, charge a set of AA's without using the national grid? That no-one has tiny solar chargers and radios? That no-one has a car battery and/or engine (fuel is another matter but with the engine components you can certainly make a generator from any rotational motion).
Hell, we were able to do things like that in the 17th/18th centuries with ZERO knowledge of electricity even existing as a source of energy or what it was at all. And you can read data off chips with an LED and a battery if need be - not fast, not fun, but similar things are done every day in the emulation ROM-recovery fields.
Hell, give me a couple of copper cables and a couple of household chemicals and I can charge a battery for you - it won't be pretty or efficient but it'll work. The Egyptians were doing it BC, for instance.
You could argue that the knowledge of electricity would be lost if enough people died but damn, you'd have more to worry about than reading Shakespeare if that's the case - food for a start would be something that if you didn't start sorting out in the first few days, and doing it well, would mean you'd have nothing to after a month or so (do you know how to farm wheat etc. on an scale big enough to feed your extended family year-round?).
Paperbacks are inherently more susceptible - solid state and magnetic storage is pretty damn hard to destroy on a national scale , but paper? It burns very nicely, thank you, and has done on nation-wide scales in the past. Not to mention the way it ages. Not to mention rotting. Not to mention fungus, water, staining, or even just plain old falling out of the binding.
Paper has advantages but has just as many disadvantages as electronics. And worrying about Shakespeare's sonnets at that moment would be pointless - for a start, your entire countries food and transport networks would be down. You'd be lucky to survive the month if you live in a crowded city.
Speaking as someone from the DOS-era, I can say that I never owned most of those - I had a 3DFX at one point but I can't think of a single game that NEEDS it that doesn't have a modern port, or isn't able to brute-force it, or doesn't work with the myriad Glide wrappers and the various DosBox patches for that. And seriously - Virge? That was like saying "ATI Rage" - never did I see a "real" 3D game run as anything faster than a stunned sloth with either of those.
I don't think most people had that sort of stuff and those that did played only a handful of mainstream titles with support for them - most of which HAD to work absolutely fine by brute-force without them because otherwise no-one would buy it. That sort of stuff came at the end of the DOS gaming era for most people, and so it would be suitably ironic for me to call you a "newb" in those sorts of gaming if that's what you're most worried about.
The only games from my DOS day that I *know* I would have benefited back-in-the-day from my 3DFX were Quake (the reason we bought the 3DFX in the first place, having seen it run on faster machines without 3D acceleration) and the original GTA. Quake is so much ported and improved now it's unbelievable and GTA had a DirectX version in the same box (and could brute-force in software mode on any vaguely modern machine without problems).
DOS games weren't about 3D, except for a tiny handful of big "eye-candy" titles towards the end of the DOS-era, so you yourself have missed the point here. And to be honest, even with the original disks, boxes and manuals to hand a lot of stuff doesn't run any more and needs to be patched, etc. to run even in an emulator. My original disk of F29-Retaliator? Dead. And I only vaguely remember just trying 7F, 7F, 7F each time as the co-ordinate on the copy-protection because it was quicker than reading through the manual for the proper co-ord. It also HAD to be run in C:\RETAL or it would just crash, errorless, back to DOS.
Modern "DOSBox" version that I run? Ironically from an abandonware site that has a version that works in any folder and takes any input on the copy-protection screen. It was worth the download just to avoid all that crap, and would have been even back-in-the-day, (I remember hacking assembler to clear Desert Strike's and Worms' CD-ROM checking code, for instance) and I *HAVE* the manual, disks etc. still. Preservation? That's a different task to wanting to enjoy old favourites, like the difference between enjoying an aged wine and keeping a 400-year-old bottle that's undrinkable.
In the old days, people would buy used because it was cheaper for them, and then the profit from that would go to an independent retailer.
Now, people can't buy used (not for most PC games anyway), so they will buy *new* only if the price is the same as used, and then the profit will go to the original producers.
It's the gaming industry's choice - keep prices how they are and expect lost used sales and/or lost overall sales (because people will want to pay less for something they can't sell on again later), or lower prices overall, or very quickly after release, so that you destroy the used sales market and reap their profit instead.
Either way, the used sales market will die (I would argue that it's already dead for PC, but console is still alive and well). But customers aren't suddenly going to start spending more money than they already do. If you are expecting them to pay more for their games overall, you're probably in for a shock and will see huge drops in sales. But if you drop to a decent price and, like you've able to do for DECADES, make used games sales unattractive, then you could take a share of profits that they used to enjoy instead.
I've started to see this on Steam - some big-name games are going to silly prices quite soon after launch. But it's still not really emerging enough.
It's simple. People allocate X% of their income to games and other entertainment luxuries. You can try to do business in a way that copes with that (i.e. stealing more of that X% than you normally would by taking over from the used sales yourself) or you can try to pretend that people will pay more and more and more over and above natural growth just because you asked for it and the game's been hyped in the press. To me, one's a good business strategy and the other's the sort of thing an eight-year-old says (and your primary gaming market now is 18-30, if not older, not children).
I don't think I've ever bought many games used anyway. I certainly can't remember doing so despite owning many computers and consoles since the ZX Spectrum. All my Spectrum games were new (most were budget because I was a child!). All my Nintendo console games were new, from the Gameboy to the Wii. 99% of my PC purchases were new. Before Steam, I used to buy old DOS titles on eBay but literally that was about the same time as they were either being made freeware (e.g. C&C) or becoming unavailable (and most of which you STILL can't buy on any of the digital download services). I now have several of those old games on Steam anyway, where I basically paid a pittance for not having to faff about with DosBox!
Used games are dead. You can either suck up their slack by pricing effectively, or you can convince yourself that in times when people can't afford to get to work (if they're lucky enough to have a job), they'll be splashing out more on games just because they are "new" and pretty. To somehow compare it to piracy (which IS also a problem exacerbated by pricing policies, a cause of huge - and wasteful - DRM investment, but one which you'll never eradicate) is ridiculous.
Sort your pricing out, and the used market won't be an issue - it will be YOURS.
Yeah, it's hard to find sympathy when that £10,000 tiny family car is for sale for a few hundred within a few years, normally as soon as it needs a full test to stay on the road.
My car is 15 years old. I bought it with 30,000 miles for £350. Since then it's done that over again (and a half) without trouble. God knows what was paid for it originally, but it depreciated faster than a house in Fukushima. And then they wonder why I don't want to pay £179 a month for five or so years, and have to pay a huge deposit and a huge final balance (or lose the car, even after 5 years of payments!) to drive something that's new and untested and has expensive parts and unknown problems and costs a fortune to insure, repair and replace.
I have about as much sympathy for games developers who are "stung" by used-game sales as I do for car manufacturers whose products depreciate to the cost of metal in the car within a handful of years.
You've put your finger on every problem I have with "AI", genetic algorithms, neural networks etc.
They basically consist of "let's throw this onto a machine and see what happens", which doesn't sound like computer science at all (I'm not saying that computer science doesn't involve bits of this, but that's not the main emphasis). It seems that an easy way to get research grants from big IT companies is to slap some cheap tech on a robot and "see what it does".
Here, they have a more interesting problem than trying to recognise shapes, or trying to get "birdbots" to flock, etc. and yet they've clearly missed the opportunity to do some research rather than throw the problems at the robots and see what happens.
I've no doubt that there are some people out there doing real work but they are tarred with the same brush as those students that slap a webcam and an actuator in a car and claim it "drives itself" because they just kept edge-finding the images and then tweaking the settings until the tolerances were okay for most things.
If you can't back up what you're doing with a decent prediction, hypothesis, test, results, conclusion, options for further study, etc. then it's not computer science - it's just "computing" or, to put it another way, pissing about with expensive hardware because you have access to it.
Hell, Roomba was a single practical application of such things and even that's a bit ropey and *WAY* out of most people's price ranges and, actually, not that good compared to doing the hoovering yourself.
I have to agree. Where's my Gnu Call software to replace Skype now that there's a massive impetus to move away from MS-owned Skype? We already have all the components in place and it's a "high priority" thing for the FSF apparently but yet - nothing. SIPWitch has been around since 2008 in 0.0000000.0.000.001 releases and there's no sight of how it will replace a Windows binary, how it will become as ubiquitous as they want it to, how well it actually works when scaled up, there's no push to use it or test it or hack on it etc.
I've always considered the FSF "the petition kid". They like to stand up and shout whenever they see an injustice but, overall, they don't get much done towards showing a better way. Most GNU projects, with the exception of a handful of "huge" projects like gcc, are on the backburners most of the time - hell, the one that pretty much started it all (HURD) "is still some way from being ready for daily use". I always worry when a project I need is on http://savannah.gnu.org/ because my experience is that most things on there tend to die quicker than they would elsewhere.
Want to impress me, FSF? Stop faffing about moaning about idiots who voluntarily sign away their lives without checking, and concentrate on a couple of your main core and high-priority projects that are sadly neglected (or even in some cases non-existent).
Most EU countries have VAT which amounts to a (different in every country but currently in the UK:) 20% tax on all sales except essentials (baby milks, children's clothing, most foods - but not "luxury" foods with chocolate in them, etc. - and, strangely, printed books).
Yet we still have high tax rates too, and it's not because we're being "stung" any more than other countries.
Hell, some EU countries just charge you 50% of whatever you earn which actually works out quite a good deal when you take into account all the tiny taxes and administrative costs of them over a lifetime. It makes taxes SO much simpler and you can actually spend time chasing those who cheat the system rather than having to need a degree in law and mathematics to understand taxation enough to tell whether something is right or not.
The UK has a tax mess too - and we really should go the blanket 50% way (although if we were to do it properly, it would be nearer the 60-something % that we're currently paying) - we have fuel tax, road tax, "tv licensing", income tax, VAT, land tax, house-buying tax, cigarette tax, alcohol tax, corporation tax, national insurance contributions, gambling tax, air passenger tax, insurance premium tax, inheritance tax, council tax, and a million others, all on sliding scales and requiring all sorts of legal basis and challenges (McVities were sued by HM Customs and Excise for classing a Jaffa Cake as a cake - untaxable - and not a luxury biscuit - taxable. The lawsuit cost millions.)
Whereas if you just said "any money or goods you earn or are given as a gift/inheritance, we want 50%", it's very easy to work out. Hell, most of the time it's almost impossible to work out what you need to pay. Self-employed people fill out a tax return and if they *don't* want to calculate their own tax, they have to send it in 6 months before those who do with the relevant data so someone else can work it out for you. And that's AFTER you've made sure to legally declare everything and put it in the right boxes and ask for the right forms.
Summary says: "The newest version of the malware exhibits some behavior that researchers haven't seen before"
The article says: "In 1999, a new virus, Win32/Crypto, was discovered... Today, in 2011, variants of Win32/Alureon are bringing this old-school technique back to life... Another interesting tidbit is that an initial version of this obfuscator first arrived in our lab in the first half of 2009."
That's kinda stretching the definition of "haven't seen before", which may be true in a technical sense (because they haven't seen THIS EXACT MALWARE before, but they've certainly seen lots like it).
If I didn't filter, I'd have to wade through all the junk that I *know* isn't true, and give equal time to dealing with creationists and evolutionists. If I filter, I can get rid of the cranks and crackpots and get down to what I want to find.
The prevailing principle here is that people will only find what they are looking for. If you're looking for vague assertions that backup your case, you'll find them. If you're looking for facts that backup your case, you stand a high chance of finding them. But if you're just looking for all the raw data and facts, you'll find them too, and can make up your own mind.
Of course there will be people who only see the data / opinions they want to see. That's their problem, not the world's (except in the context of giving them a metaphorical slap and telling them to grow up) and not their filters.
I recently introduced my 2-year-old daughter to one of her grandparents (who lives 800 miles away). He has a reputation for zaniness and within minutes she'd learned that when he said he was going to steal all her toys, or that he was taking her off to live on an oil rig in the middle of the sea, it was best to ignore him and carry on as normal. She filtered. Without that filter, the distress of the early stages of meeting him would have continued forever. But she still knew when he was actually serious about, say, giving her some chocolate and when he was playing about. The filter is there to do just that - filter the things you don't want to hear or don't care about or don't believe out.
You'll only have an insular existence if that's what you WANT to have.
I have to say - paying to receive SMS is possibly the most stupid thing I've ever heard anyone agree to. It was back when mobile phones first came out and still is now.
The problem is not Facebook there - the problem is people who tolerate a stupid system where you can end up paying for something you never asked for.
IE certainly did but they give that away for free and its still losing marketshare every day.
But Office? I think they wrote most of that themselves, though no doubt they used some libraries and contributions from various places they took over, I think we have to say that Office is "theirs".
From what I see, most of their acquisitions turn out to be dumb ideas, either for MS or the people getting taken over. I made a list on the The Register of some of the software they got via takeovers and most of it was stuff that I abandoned at almost exactly the same time, even if I didn't know it was an MS product by then.
First question: Would you touch a car with MS onboard?
OpenOffice was open-source. As such it still exists elsewhere and (I don't think it's harsh to say) the original OO, from the community, to download numbers to feature support, is dead.
Skype is closed-source. There isn't any way that it could continue without the owner's support.
You can only "wipe out" something that isn't open-source. Most of Linux, and most of the "big apps" on Linux are open-source, and hence have been pretty immortal up until now.
Dropbox isn't open-source (from the server side). Thus it's just as likely to die a death, like any "cloud" faddy thing around today.
All those people who rely on closed-source things should have noticed a pattern by now. OO "dies", LO "is born". The "official" Java dies, they are already alternatives. Netscape "dies" and things like Mozilla carry on.
I wouldn't bet on Skype being "the" video tool in a year's time. In fact, I probably wouldn't bet on it still existing in a recognisable form.
Previous history teaches us to be wary. Fool me once, and all that.
The point is that if you've been reliant on an awful lot of things that MS has bought out in the past, you've come unstuck - usually not long after they bought it out. I put a list on The Register already and I can't be bothered to go find it and paste it back in.
And even if true, then the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Watch what MS do. Based on past personal history, I predict that a lot of people who *aren't* complaining and currently *using* Skype won't be using it in the future. You can prove me wrong (for the first time ever, when it comes to MS) in a year's time if that's not the case.
You honestly think that MS are going to continue the Android version of Skype, for instance? That they won't fight tooth-and-nail to stop third-party clients using the Skype network without be "authorised" by MS? That somehow they'll be nice as pie to all those MacOS and Linux users they have currently? You seem to be suggesting that they could even enhance the service.
And, like everyone who's worked in IT for a while and seen how MS has behaved historically, I don't believe it and even if they turn it into the most wonderful, open service in the world, they STILL have a lot of making up until I start to trust their intentions by default.
Retards for having a principle and not wanting to *risk* getting stung? I'm a retard then. A professional one in fact. Strangely, I'm not even using Linux on the desktop either. You don't have to be a fanboi to worry about getting stung, and you don't have to be one to not trust someone's intentions based on past behaviour.
I still have Skype installed. But every update from now will be installed retrospectively once other guinea pigs have a chance to tell me what they changed. And I'm actually researching current alternatives - I'm hoping this might be the impetus needed to forge a decent, ubiquitous, cross-platform and open-source alternative. While Skype was doing what people wanted, there was no need for an alternative - now I, and many others, are looking for one - just in case.
I am removing the superfluous buns.
(Father of the Bride)
So your desktops are all 100Mbps (which, you're right, is more than adequate for general use).
So the switch they plug into has to have a 1Gb backbone (usually one per 12-16 clients for office-type stuff, or else you hit bottlenecks when everyone is online - but for everyone to have "true" 100Mb, you need a 1Gb line per 8-or-so clients).
Those 1Gb backbones (usually muliple) then have to daisy-chain throughout your site (and thus if your total combined usage is over 1Gb in any one direction, you're stuffed) OR you can give them multiple 1Gb lines or (in the future) a 10Gb line as backbone.
A 24-port 10/100 with 2 port 10Gb will be a killer product when it emerges, is standardised, and cheap enough. Hell, I could use it NOW.
The school I work in has a central database run from two bonded 1Gb connections on the server. I think the school would pay even today's prices for 10Gb if it was standardised and ubiquitous enough to be on servers and switches by default. That's a school with 150 machines, most of which can't even go on the database anyway (about 25 do) - hardly a huge demand or unusual circumstances.
We'd certainly pay for 10Gb ports on the servers and a single 10Gb port on a switch that we then load up with 10/100 and Gigabit connections to ensure the best throughput for those ports. That's for a quite-small database - we don't do video-streaming or anything heavy over that connection.
The Internet connection? Yeah, we only have 2 x 24Mbps anyway, so it's no use for that. But internal connections often shift a hell of a lot more data (how much data do you think is transferred if you do PXE booting, or centralised file/application storage on servers, etc.?). 10Gb should be available today - it's taking too long. 100Gb is around the corner and could be in every school in 10 years or so, especially with the push towards video-streaming/caching, etc.
It's hardly rocket-science type uses that apply here. An ordinary school could make good use of 10Gb today and even is beginning to have a *need* for it.
Really? I use Opera, with "Accept cookies only from the site I visited" set to on (which is the default) and have never run into a problem with this.
What sites specifically? Because I have *zero* cookies from either of those sites you mentioned and yet don't have a problem navigating any of what I would consider the major sites - the only sites that give me problems are ones where they don't have Opera compatibility at all, I can't even remember the last time I had a cookie issue (maybe with the inbuilt Steam browser not staying logged into Steam community - but I can't even *see* the cookie settings for that).
I've refused every offer of training ever given to me. After leaving uni, I was an independent technician for 10 years - roaming from place to place with year-long contracts with various schools (up to 8 simultaneously, on a sort of shift rota). The longest-term ones had me there for 8-9 of those years consecutively because they liked my work, and even poached me from an employer (at great expense) and hired me full-time for 2 years at the end (I left because of internal politics which I hadn't been subjected to previously). I did everything from managing their finance servers to writing new programs.
They never had a problem with my work, but they were nice enough to offer me training to advance myself. I refused. Why? Because they couldn't find a course suitable.
The problem with IT training is that it's generally aimed at people new to the industry. Even when you get into the £2000/day training courses, it's Powerpoint slideshows and "let's all try that now, shall we?" from someone who's never been in a professional position except "trainer", and on material that you could teach *them* more about than they could teach you. Don't even get me started on the mainstream junk (e.g. MCSE, etc.). Learning menu positions, control panel icons, how to use the MMC etc. by rote isn't learning.
Every training on a "new technology" would have me sleeping within 30 minutes. When your training could be surpassed by a 1-page crib sheet written by someone at the same level as the participants, you know the training is a waste of time. And if you attend training and find yourself in a room with more than 20% of people with pen-and-paper on their lap, religiously scribbling down every click they see, do yourself a favour and leave.
And precisely how many of my employers have ever been bothered by the amount of professional training I have? Zero. They don't even ask, because I was making a career of it (at my own personal financial risk) before they'd even heard of the various certifications (or, in some cases, used a computer). How many were dissatisfied with my work? Zero.
Amusingly, one employer wanted me to take the ECDL just so they could say all their staff had it. The look they got was enough to have them backing out of the room in silence.
IT Training, from my point of view, is currently a complete waste of time. It's an excuse for a jolly-up, disguised in a £2000/day invoice. And if someone needs to be *professionally* trained to do their job - you hired the wrong person. You can do little one-day seminars on certain topics (e.g. legal implications of new data protection laws, etc.) but to actually think that you need to keep training your IT staff to keep them working at the right level? That's ludicrous. Also, I wouldn't expect them to PAY to train themselves either, that's just silly.
Just give them 5-10% of their day on side-projects. Mention that the company will be wanting you to be able to do X within a year, and they'll use that time to train themselves up. You're "paying" for it, because it comes out of their work-time. You're not paying over-the-odds or floating a crappy here-today-gone-tomorrow "training" company. And within a year, they'll have grasped whatever concepts they need to (and if they haven't - that's the sign of a lazy worker, because they were pre-informed). If it's a massive job, they'll ask for materials and/or support and before you know it you have a trainer, and complete training materials, in-house for the rest of your staff.
It works fabulously from the lowest ranks ("We're *going* to be moving to this new telephone system - I'll put your new phone here, here's a brief intro, you'll have your old system and phone up until the end of the year but we *will* be switching then to the new system - get used to it" - replace phone with software, PC, input device, whatever) to the most skilled ("Next year, we're going to move *everything* to SAP - do you know SAP? No - well, no problem, we have a year and
They "support" it now. So do Intel. The problem is not that the processor or even chipset supports it but that the bundled BIOS *IS* coreboot, which is unlikely.
And even then, every tweak made by a motherboard manufacturer has to be taken account of. It's like saying the AMD "supports" running Linux on it. Course it does, but it doesn't mean that the computer can actually run Linux usefully (Argh! Flashback to the days when a lot machines *couldn't* get basic support under Linux working without patching an tweaking).
It's a step forward but hardly worth shouting about - when Foxconn, MSI, etc. get on board, then you have a deal. Until then, it's like saying that my computer support FireWire. It does. It just doesn't have any FireWire ports, and I haven't installed the drivers for them on any OS.
"the simple fact is he was a enemy agent"
Says who? Isn't that a fact that could only be established in a trial? Where's the evidence that he ordered any of this, rather than just claimed responsibility for it on a couple of videos, or even coerced into being the scapegoat while the true culprit gets clean away (every time I've ever seen a bombing, some nutter, somewhere has taken responsibility for it even if they didn't do it - it's a known factor in confessions, etc. - some people just claim responsibility for things). At which point did he receive a trial to determine the facts (and, come on, the US is one of the few countries left where you could fast-track him to execution if you so wanted after finding him guilty)?
Was the US at war with HIM personally, or the country he resided in? Can a country be at war with a concept (terrorism, drug-abuse, etc.)? Can a country be at war with a single person, and thus see his killing as a simple "act of war"? Isn't that just an excuse for justifying assassination, which is actually NOT allowed under US law (and hence the UK has been doing that kind of dirty work for the US for a long time because we don't have a law against that)?
If the US was at war with Pakistan at the time (nope, they're supposed to be allies at the moment!), then possibly you could see how his killing could be merely the casualty of war but how does that fit with him being specifically targeted and specifically assassinated?
What if, say, Julian Assange does something the US disagree with? Can you "declare war" on him? Can you bomb any country he's in to kingdom come? Can you (legally) send out a team of SEAL's to a foreign country to put a bullet in his head? What about if he claimed to have some national-security information that you killed him for but actually never did - does that justify an assassination? What about if the local nutter claims responsibility for 9/11, can you shoot him too without trial?
As to being "too risky" to capture - you had him. You had him, in a room, surrounded by your people with guns, and no actual resistance that was a threat. You extracted those same SEAL's, so you could have extracted him too. Hell, you extracted his body to a warship, apparently, for burial. If you can prove he reached for a gun, even the police would have shot him, let alone the army, but there's no evidence he did.
If he had explosives on him - your SEAL's shot him dead and would have instantly triggered any dead-man's switch while standing in the same room as him. Or maybe even hit the explosives with bullets themselves. That would make them pillocks and make such a mission incredibly stupid if you even suspected that. I would like to think that they KNEW there wasn't anything explosive in the house that posed a threat beforehand.
There's a simple way to prove to countries that you're superior to terrorism - and it doesn't involve trying to "terrorise" the terrorists, everyone associated with them, every country they go near, torturing innocents in foreign prisons with STILL no hope of trial/release yet, and bombing foreign countries for TEN YEARS. It involves capturing those you think are responsible and showing the world that you're BETTER than them - by giving them a humane trial (like we did with virtually EVERY captured dictator, Nazi, etc. that we believed may have committed war crimes of much vaster proportions than one bomb on one building - and at least their crimes were in the middle of a real fecking war!), giving them a chance to justify their actions and THEN acting (even if that decision involves execution).
Tell me - why does Saddam Hussein get this treatment:
"Captured on 13 December 2003, Saddam was brought to trial under the Iraqi interim government. On 5 November 2006, he was convicted of charges related to the 1982 killing of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites and was sentenced to death by hanging." whereas Osama Bin Laden got a bullet in the head and zero evidence?
Expense of a trial? Do you have any idea how much t
That's no excuse.
I work in schools (i.e. limited budget). It's just not sensible or practical to have ANY of that stuff running Wifi, especially in solid-build buildings, near residential areas, or anywhere you need something to STAY connected.
We have HVAC controls - on a Cat5 outlet that we put in specially. The electrician ran it in with the electrical outlets and the AC engineers run it with their cabling happily too - for the price of the cable / box and a little extra labour.
We have a printer in every room. Usually wired to the same Cat5 outlet as the main computer outlet.
We have door-controls - same thing. All over Cat5/IP, even down to the individual door activators and swipe-card sensors.
We have VoIP - same thing. If there isn't a socket where we need it, Cat5 goes in for no more than a phone line of the same length / distance.
We have CCTV - all wired to Cat5 sockets rather than with Coax back to a central point because that would mean more unnecessary cabling when the Cat5 does the job and STILL supplies Gigabit Ethernet to several other devices on the same point.
And then eventually you realise - after a while, in any large building, you still always have a Cat5 point within 100m (usually within 10m) and from there you can do everything you need to split it / put a switch in and join even more stuff to the normal network.
Cat5 is a universal deployment that virtually everything can use once plugged in and can be extended to ridiculous means (i.e. Gigabit to every outlet, so you CAN stream multiple CCTV channels from the other end of the building without having to worry about the wireless bandwidth / interference in between and/or knocking out other systems).
Whereas our wireless deployments? In the middle of a residential area, we can't get more than 8 machines into a room reliably using Wifi - even with flooding 3 channels full from school AP's - ( and where reliability means "can login via LDAP without having to constantly retry") because of the interference and up/down-ness of it all - training days we only use switches and hard cables now.
What we do expose to Wifi can be picked up miles away if you want to but can't be used reliably on the other side of the room. Wireless CCTV interferes like hell and knocks out both itself and the Wifi and other 2.4GHz gadgets.
Yet with wired cabling we can cover the entire building with the minimum of fuss. Diagnosis is simple (green light on switch = working). Things don't change over time. We can have redundant and even circular links. We don't drown out our neighbours.
It costs LESS than the Wifi crap - hell a run of Cat5 to the maximum run (with installation costs and sockets) costs less than a single access point (without installation costs) if you have decent contractors that aren't conning you. If you have in-house staff, you also save the "profit" that you would have given the contractor.
Copper cabling saves you so much more hassle and time and money and effort and extraneous costs, if you're being charged sensible prices, and stays that way pretty much forever - use your brain and install Cat6a now and you're save until each outlet needs more than 10Gb/s. Install wifi now and for MORE cost, you get LESS service, LESS reliability and in before you even get to 200MB/s you're going to be replacing them ALL.
Magicka: Marshlands.