Being autistic (or on the spectrum somewhere) is no excuse for deliberately being a cock towards women.
I'm almost certainly autistic, I have all the possible traits of it. But I'll be fucked if I judge a woman coder over any other. Hell, if anything, the social aspects of such conditions mean that you wouldn't conform to such obvious social stereotypes and prejudices.
Nobody can stop you being a cock, overall. But being a cock towards women rather than men is just a deliberate, targeted prejudice no matter what you claim to be suffering from.
Stop conflating "autism" with certain social disorders or with racist / sexist / ageist dickheads. If anything, people like myself treat all people equally - with complete apathy.
When you have ZERO choice over the installation of the updates (sure, you can refuse them. Thousands of times for the next few years. And then all the programs stop updating and won't work, etc. and even things like AirPlay change - AirServer has had incompatible updates pushed for just about every iOS update out there).
When it's so all-or-nothing, then the correct solution is to just say "Sorry, not supported" or even "Don't ask me again" (never seen that option on any fucking Apple product yet). Not to just keep making you, then making it (pretty much) a one-way process, and then discovering your phone that can do things like take calls while an app is running on iOS7 suddenly can't on iOS 9. Which kinda breaks its use as a phone.
Old stuff is old, but - fuck - you can't just stop shit working as it did originally, for features that old phones can't take advantage of anyway. Not without customer's hitting back.
An iPhone costs as much as a fucking laptop. But in this day and age, a laptop for last for years and you can CHOOSE not to go Windows 10 (though I foresee lawsuits in that direction too) and it doesn't stop you using the machine like you did before.
"The kiosks are free, public Wi-Fi access points" "the full network will eventually include over 7,500 of them." "The displays are expected to bring the city $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years."
500m / 12 / 7500 = $5555.55 per year per kiosk.
I'm presuming that's ALL advertising because - why would you pay to charge your phone or browse the web nowadays?
But, let's presume that's true. If it brings in $5k per year per kiosk, how much is it going to cost to fit out? Gigabit wifi, some sort of Internet connection, two huge screens, some device managing the screens, cost of refit, etc. etc. etc. That's GOT to lose you several YEARS of revenue per kiosk almost immediately, yes? And then... quite where's the profit coming from?
And that's not talking about vandalism, damage, wear and tear, weatherproofing, maintenance, etc.
Say that's a "signature". There are only "n" so many places you can put the null-check that will work properly.
Say you can list "m" such things. Then, at most, you can categorise every programmer into one of m x n groups (and, in fact, you might find that certain m's and n's go hand-in-hand, etc.).
So, if you have something like github - that has 11 million users and 30m repos at last count. Let's assume that most of those 11 million users, then, are programmers that commit code. You'd need to find over 3000 such signatures, each with 3000 possibilities. Or several HUNDRED THOUSAND such signatures, each with a few hundred options.
Yes, you don't need to narrow down to an individual, but if you're going to use this to try to do - what? Convict malware authors? Then you need to be pretty certain. "Beyond reasonable doubt".
And I'd like to point out that I've committed code that I didn't actually write, or that I tweaked from others in minor ways to fit my preferred style. So there's all kinds of complications.
This is bunkem and bollocks. It's about as scientific as starsigns, as useful as "smelling" the code to see if you can detect a whiff of the programmer's body odour, and as admissible as graphology.
And, if I thought I was writing malware, I can tell you now that I'd do everything I could to disguise the origins of the code, including coding style. I'd make it as boring and non-personal as possible. And likely anything I do would be optimised to oblivion by any compiler anyway.
On a hard disk, you had to keep the power up to keep the motor spinning or not-one-byte would be written to disk in the correct position.
On SSD, it's either got voltage to write, or not. At worst, you run a chkdsk on it.
But I have to echo all the other sentiment here - why the fuck are you worried about the storage devices during power loss? Much more problematic is what it's doing to the rest of the hardware, and in general.
And fixed by a $100 UPS, or the "automatic" UPS of using a laptop, tablet or smartphone (P.S. smartphones, laptops, tablets, et al are MUCH MORE likely to just run out of battery before they can shut down safely if they are allowed to run low - how do you think they cope?)
I'm guessing you've read some overblown articles about shitty hardware, in outages that a hard drive wouldn't survive either, from people who don't bother with a UPS or backups.
Try it yourself, buy an SSD (hell, mirror it to a spinning disk if you want), see what happens.
But, to be honest, just buy / use a UPS and stop worrying about it. They aren't that fragile, anyway.
If you had any care for email privacy anyway, you'd buy a stupendously cheap domain, activate forwarding on the catch-all, and then use a bunch of one-time addresses.
I know what address I gave Steam. I know it's never been spammed. Because only they and I know what it was. If it does get spammed, someone hacked Steam, or me, or something like this happened.
So I then generate another address, change my steam email to that, block the now-public one, and carry on with my life.
The problem with people who claim the sky is falling is that they never stop to think about how to stop it falling on them.
Stop fucking with electrical devices that control mains water inlet into your house.
Seriously.
And I echo all the "one setting" / "won't happen" posts here. You probably can't (often there's a microcontroller but pissing about with them nowadays is almost impossible. Even simple PIC chips can be made "write-once" very easily and often are. The whole ELM327 clone market came about because of one chip not protecting it's code and it no doubt destroyed profits overnight.
Even if you DO get a firmware from it, reverse-engineering it is a lot of pissing about. Even if you get a replacement firmware / modifiable firmware / emulated board back into the device, what do you think it's going to be able to do? Activate pump. Deactivate pump. Activate heater. Deactivate heater. Open valve. Close valve. That's about it. You might be able to play with timings and temperatures but more likely you'll have several months of flooding your kitchen, blowing the fuses and/or setting the place on fire by running over-spec.
And what could you gain? Very, very, very slightly cleaner dishes. Possibly.
There's a reason that the washing machine market is nearly 100 years old, and yet in all the time that it's been electrical (I remember large rotary electromechanical switches on a washing machine, etc.) or electronic, nobody really bothers to make "clone" spare parts for those things. They rarely go wrong (the pumps themselves? That's another matter). Rarely can be tinkered with in any significant way. Rarely would be worth the time, effort and liability to play with.
But it could just be that one of their database instances is out of sync with another, causing one request for a webpage to retrieve several different (and then cached) bits of information for entirely different users. What was user 27 on one database might not be on the other, so you end up logging in as you, but getting Fred's language, and George's wishlist, etc.
Just because you can think of bad ways to program, doesn't mean they are the only possible cause. Steam is a massive place, that has successfully survived an intrusion because it did properly encrypt and hash all relevant data in the past, and which makes heavy use of distributed servers and content delivery networks.
Under DDoS conditions - as suspected to have precluded this problem, it's quite possible some database server has got out of sync, been corrupted while being shut-down or improperly synchronised, or even just filled up and no longer able to properly replicate the global database.
So I'm still voting for some guy who gets to vote for anything - even something completely against what I want?
That's still not democracy.
(P.S. also the reason I don't vote - one 70-millionth of a vote for a local head, that I've never been able to meet or speak to, of a well-funded party of which only two are contenders and only three have ever been in power, which results in one of the parties being elected based on how many areas they win - not how many votes they got overall - which is then used to justify every action performed under their name for the next four years, even if that's a complete u-turn on what was said before the election, with no possibility to revert or change the vote or vote for "anyone" - i.e. me? Why can't I vote for me? Or my friend that I trust to do the right thing?)
And all that happens is that everyone turns up for the "Do we hang this guy who might have touched a kid in the past but we're not sure and the judiciary can't decide?" vote (and turn a political issue into an emotional / media / vigilante one) , and no fucker turns up for the "Should we contribute to European agriculture laws into which someone has shoehorned GCHQ's latest attempt to screw us all over" vote because nobody can understand it.
You want to change your vote, but can't because of whatever reason (no Internet, etc.)
Do you end up voting by default the way you voted last time? Or do you have to put in a vote between a certain window?
Oops. You either have a stupid situation, or you're back to the old way of voting.
Not to mention that it requires electronic voting which - in any significant amount - is still not as provable, prevalent or as tamper-proof as it could be.
Ignore. Filter the alert emails from that ISP if necessary. Get on with life. (P.S. Just double-check you put it on the block list).
Run any internet server in any datacenter in the world and you get this times a thousand. You can't trace them all. Hell, you can't even spend the time to trace all those spam email attempts you would get either.
What, precisely, do you think is being done to your connection that's worth the time and effort to even follow-up on it? A few packets hitting a firewall that is set to block and deny them any further access anyway?
Get a life, honestly. And turn off alert emails for port-scans. Turn on proper IDS/IPS, but turn off that particular alert because - well - it happens all the time anyway and it isn't going to stop just because you stop one IP range.
Spend the time you save on double-checking that people can't get into even the open services that you do offer to the net (SMTP, NTP, etc. if relevant). Whether you respond open or close, or whether the firewall rejects or allows, the requests still means that the packet was send, received, acted on, and replied to (or not, as the case may be). And in terms of your overall connection it's going to be like 0.001% of your traffic, if that.
Then go and work in any static-IP, Internet-facing network department that runs in-house services like webservers, VPN, email, etc. And notice that they just wouldn't care and don't have the time to do anything about such trivial shite.
The US - and any other country in the world - has the power to stop people entering official flights into their country. It's quite a basic right. We're actually considering it now for Donald Trump.
It's not that the UK "cooperated" with this or anything. The US refused them entry to a flight to the US. I've seen similar things done because the guy in question was someone who didn't have an official visa who they suspected of working illicitly, so they threw him out of the US before and we wasn't able to even book a flight to the US without the airline refusing / refunding his money a few days later. No matter what airline.
Give it a few more months and a few more gaffes and Donald Trump will be in the same position. The UK flights will deny him boarding even if the US airports let him through security right to the gate, etc.
MOD need specialist support to play now. Plus they need to be made by the original music creator - they capture each instrument individually and, as such, many things you might want to do you can't, and the mod player is responsible for decoding, timing, etc. which is an overhead.
MID technically needs hardware support or software instruments to play - and never quite sounds the same. The storage size doesn't include the software instruments - It was 45Mb last time I downloaded a soundfont for a soundcard. Plus they need to be made by the original music creator, and can't have various effects and changes done to them.
MP3 etc. are just sound recordings, not music formats, and are the final composition, layered with other instruments, effects, etc. Library support is pretty universal.
Graphics don't scale as nicely as you might think. Like fonts, you can't just scale up or down unless the original is vector. And then you have to process them and people complain that a game with a few boxes slows to a crawl when a lot of enemies are on-screen or requires a long startup time to rasterise them all in the right size first, or requires a 3D card with hundreds of megs of texture memory to hold them all.
Don't forget that nowadays, just the SDL library is several megabytes. It's supports all kinds of things that didn't even exist back in the 8-bit days. Hell SDL_TTF rendering requires a large library, plus FreeType, plus a font (the DejaVu fonts are 600Kb each or thereabouts). Sure, this is all "wastage" and you could just encode a bitmap font. For every possible screen resolution. Or run in fixed resolution. Like the 320x240's (or even half that) of the 8-bit era. Everytime you double a resolution, you QUADRUPLE the storage size required. So today's 1900x1200 screens require a lot more sprites to fill them and a lot more detail in those sprites to not look shit, and a lot more storage to hold it all.
There are reasons that things grew. I grew up in the 48Kb era. Have you looked at things like the Skool Daze disassembly. Fuck spending all that time squeezing that stuff into individual bits and still ended up with a ten-screen game because of memory restrictions.
Don't forget the amount of libraries that are sucked in to any simple program now. Dozens of megs for something as simple as calculator. Everything comes back to MSVCRT and a ton of Windows DLL's. On Linux, everything needs libc, and a bucket of support libraries and devices.
The reason it's so much more is because computers do so much more. And in terms of programming, I'd rather they spent time on making the game rather than pissing about optimising the graphics format for a 2D platformer. As it is they are short of people, short of code, lagging in development - and you want them to spend an age pissing about prematurely optimising shit using obsolete formats for the sake of some bit-level purism? That's a sure way to lose every developer on the project.
Especially compared to "#include " and just getting started straight away, even if that drags in megabytes of libraries that almost EVERY game written today uses.
Maybe he should get his employer (Adobe) to get rid of that shitty sidebar that only disappears if you click the word Tools (despite no indication that's what's active) and which comes back every time you restart Acrobat Reader.
No to mention the billion-and-one things that can pop over the top of your PDF. Or the services, scheduled tasks, taskbar icons, startup entries, etc. that are recreated all the fucking time even when you disable them and tell it not to update. Or the horrendous options dialogs that hide all the options.
When you have a business with lots of money invested into a piece of code that runs your business, is custom, and can only be tinkered with by high-end and expensive coders, your money may well be better invested in getting it working on Wine than either porting it (a MASSIVE task that far too many people underestimate) or patching it (and thus playing with the program and potentially breaking it).
Lots of people are stuck on Windows programs - it's easy to say "they shouldn't have stuck on Windows, then" but that's not the way life works. You don't set out creating a massive, cross-platform, idealised, perfectly-programmed application from the start. That's like saying "let's just build all this airport in modular fashion so we can expand and change its use and rejig its layout - it'll cost ten times more at the start, but will save us money in the long run" - perfectly sensible, but never, ever going to be approved by any budgetary committee.
I was running Office on both Crossover and Wine for years. It more than does its job. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than even trying to get old XP apps working on, say, Windows 10 (and no, don't just say "You shouldn't be doing that" - this is not how things work).
Games are an entirely different matter. For a start, there is a limit on the number of resources available to the 3D APIs, and many games pushed those limits. Now, trying to "emulate" those games means working around those limits while staying WITHIN those limits yourself, which can cause a lot of problems. We're still dealing with games using direct-rendering mode here, for instance.
And games move and evolve so quickly that being able to run even the last few years of games on a platform never intended to be developed for, is fucking amazing. But that's not the purpose of Wine.
No. If you want games on Linux, ask the developers to port their games to Linux. You'll see significantly LESS joy than getting those games running on Wine. I assure you.
I suggest Apple sue the arse off of Have I Got News For You (a BBC TV comedy program, that focuses on political humour, and isn't afraid to take the piss out of current news articles, politicians, and even invites them on to stand their ground - one of the regular guests is Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, who's been sued multiple times for defamation and libel and very rarely loses... the magazine itself is the origin of the Arkell v. Pressdram case (Google it!)).
Only last week, the implication that Apple was avoiding tax was made on the show (joking that the bite out of the Apple logo was "the bit where the tax should be"), laughed at, and broadcast. Strange, then, that Apple haven't made a fuss or a statement about that, isn't it?
It's easy to make a lot of money if you don't pay the proper taxes. Until the laws changes and it catches up with you. A few companies in the EU are finding that out at the moment. Luxembourg looks likely to no longer be the EU tax haven it once was.
Gosh. Guess Valve bringing out a Steam controller with all kinds of customisability and the ability to have as many buttons as you like (customisable pads, shoulder buttons, etc.) is a waste of time then?
Or you could plug in an XBox 360 controller - the USB adaptors for the PC are literally a few pence now - and have four buttons, four shoulders, D-pad, two thumbsticks, etc.?
Steam know that some things are keyboard/mouse, some are joystick, some are "joypad" (as they were called in my day) and some are steering wheel / other specialist controllers. That's why they released one of their own joypads and made the entire product navigable using just that from your TV.
Get them to tell you THEIR static IP, and only apply port forwarding from their address to your internal VLAN.
Problem solved.
Have to do it all the time for telephony, CCTV, remote software support, etc. I let them have a port-forward but only if:
a) they give me their source IP (I get the asked the same when I set up VPN's etc. anyway, so everyone does this!) b) they only get one set of port-fowards to the internal system c) I reserve the right to cut that connection off for 99.9% of the time until they actually NEED to do something. They ring me up, I open up JUST THAT PORT to JUST THAT IP, then they have to tell me when they are finished.
It makes it much easier to manage, to log, and to control your devices.
Nobody sensible opens up any port to the world unless they have a public-facing service on that port and have secured it properly (e.g. email, web, vpn). But "port-forward" does not mean you let the world into it.
And if the attackers know and can spoof the IP of your remote support, then you're in bigger trouble anyway! That's not the kind of attacker that you're going to be able to easily defend against. But with a plain port-forward, all they'll get (if you've done it properly) is into the VLAN and the cameras, not your systems.
And, guess what. The only device that traverses several VLANs should really be your gateway anyway. There's no point VLANning off and then having everything sit on all the VLANs. So you might as well just have the gateway port-forward and then all the config is on one device.
(Not only that, VPN setup like you suggest is a pain in the arse for most people anyway. If you have a hundred customers, with a hundred VPN's, it quickly becomes stupendous to put them all on 24/7, because of IP subnets stomping over each other and all sorts of confusions. That's before you get into the million-and-one variations of VPN and VPN settings and managing certs and credentials).
Security through obscurity (which is what this is) is doomed to fail. It *can* work, for short periods, when it's unexpected, when people aren't really looking (how many people just have a "secret URL" on their blog to get into the admin interface so that it's not publicly visible - doesn't stop people finding it), etc.
But anything like this? Pointless. And one academic getting careless with encryption even once would likely see them sacked in such a place.
It's not at all hard with a brief packet capture to find some common element or even trace a particular conversation of interest in - quite literally - seconds. Hell, I run a small commercial network and we transfer Terabytes over it every single day. Just that sheer volume is more obfuscation than anything else. Have you seen how long it takes to store those kinds of packet captures and apply filters when you're talking dozens of terabytes of data? Nothing to do with crafting them, that's a Wireshark tutorial and ten minutes. But actually applying them needs a lot of data filtering.
But, still, I call bullshit. They're just playing at it if they are really doing that for that purpose. It would be the work of a moment to immediately alert someone and discard any unencrypted packets on such a network. Generating costly fake traffic that gets in your way, slows things down, and could bollocks up your own data investigations? Pointless.
Yes, but you, your kids, your spouse, your visitors, etc. can all do that at the same time without slowing down. As video streaming is taking off, you can all stream in HD without stuttering.
And, sorry, but every fecking website on the planet - virtually - can easily swamp a 100Mbps connection at the other end, on demand, whenever it's necessary. Most of the time my servers are sitting bog-idle in their datacentre, even with thousands of hits coming in. It's only when I deliberately transfer, say, a 1Gb file up or down that I see that line full.
As people move to AWS, etc. that situation only get better. It's rarely the server that's the bottleneck. It's rarely the client that's the bottleneck. The bottleneck is slap-bang in the middle - the ISP and their upstream.
Which is what makes me dubious here. Every customer gets 100Mb guaranteed? That's one fucking hell of an upload connection they are promising there. 10 customers is a Gigabit leased line somewhere. 1000 customers is 100 Gigabit. The numbers get silly VERY quickly. And that's the MINIMUM they need.
I want to know who they are peering with at Tb/s "for free"... because that's one hell of a deal.
However, I suspect - as ever - that the servers at Google, Facebook, YouTube et al are perfectly capable of pushing multiple 4K streams your way at max speed, and your local net and maybe even local connection are capable of similar speeds for data to other local machines, and the ISP is "capable" of similar speeds but they never actually achieve them because they have limited peering, bottlenecks, limits, rate-limits and throttling, because the thinnest piece of pipe is actually the one that connects THEM and their thousands of customers to the Net.
They don't need to heat up a gas. They need to heat up one atom at a time. Or a handful at most.
As such, the amount of energy to get it to millions of degrees is almost nothing. The only reason your bath takes so long to heat up is because of the AMOUNT of water you need heated. Even a few extra litres can take measurably longer to heat (e.g. shower vs bath efficiency).
But with fusion, when you pop that atom, you get more energy out than you put in. The actual problem is not in "how do you get that hot" but "how do you stop it just getting hotter". Same with fission reactors - the energy given to the particle which is blasting apart the large atoms there is humungous, but more worrying is how do you stop the runaway reaction.
Answer: Control the fuel very carefully so there's not a risk of damage to the tons of lead or whatever surrounding it, and put lots of stuff in the way.
What temperature do you think ordinary fission reactors run at every day in their cores? Or large laser projects?
Apart from the fact that things like ceramics can sustain incredible temperatures en-masse (far more than anything a metal can, or you wouldn't be able to cast a lot of metals!), yet "bake" in a kiln of other a few thousand degrees to get like that in the first place.
But,yes, they hold a TINY reaction for a handful of atoms that even if you dropped it into your hand would be cooled almost immediately by the billions of atoms it touched en-route, and they keep it in a magnetic field so it's never touching anything, and they surround the experiment in a large mass of materials more than capable of taking the heat.
"Temperature" is really an average of all the atoms in the local area. So even with one atom at a million degrees, in a cup full of water, there are so many cooler atoms that the average temperature of the whole system won't diverge noticeably from room temperature at all.
Same way that "water" becomes "steam" at 100 degrees - but the hundreds of degrees happens in tiny contained areas for a handful of molecules of water which generates a tiny amount for steam which bubbles to the surface and dissipates - and that can happen for ten minutes before the majority of the water in the pan is actually BOILING itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Being autistic (or on the spectrum somewhere) is no excuse for deliberately being a cock towards women.
I'm almost certainly autistic, I have all the possible traits of it. But I'll be fucked if I judge a woman coder over any other. Hell, if anything, the social aspects of such conditions mean that you wouldn't conform to such obvious social stereotypes and prejudices.
Nobody can stop you being a cock, overall. But being a cock towards women rather than men is just a deliberate, targeted prejudice no matter what you claim to be suffering from.
Stop conflating "autism" with certain social disorders or with racist / sexist / ageist dickheads. If anything, people like myself treat all people equally - with complete apathy.
When you have ZERO choice over the installation of the updates (sure, you can refuse them. Thousands of times for the next few years. And then all the programs stop updating and won't work, etc. and even things like AirPlay change - AirServer has had incompatible updates pushed for just about every iOS update out there).
When it's so all-or-nothing, then the correct solution is to just say "Sorry, not supported" or even "Don't ask me again" (never seen that option on any fucking Apple product yet). Not to just keep making you, then making it (pretty much) a one-way process, and then discovering your phone that can do things like take calls while an app is running on iOS7 suddenly can't on iOS 9. Which kinda breaks its use as a phone.
Old stuff is old, but - fuck - you can't just stop shit working as it did originally, for features that old phones can't take advantage of anyway. Not without customer's hitting back.
An iPhone costs as much as a fucking laptop. But in this day and age, a laptop for last for years and you can CHOOSE not to go Windows 10 (though I foresee lawsuits in that direction too) and it doesn't stop you using the machine like you did before.
"The kiosks are free, public Wi-Fi access points"
"the full network will eventually include over 7,500 of them." "The displays are expected to bring the city $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years."
500m / 12 / 7500 = $5555.55 per year per kiosk.
I'm presuming that's ALL advertising because - why would you pay to charge your phone or browse the web nowadays?
But, let's presume that's true. If it brings in $5k per year per kiosk, how much is it going to cost to fit out? Gigabit wifi, some sort of Internet connection, two huge screens, some device managing the screens, cost of refit, etc. etc. etc. That's GOT to lose you several YEARS of revenue per kiosk almost immediately, yes? And then... quite where's the profit coming from?
And that's not talking about vandalism, damage, wear and tear, weatherproofing, maintenance, etc.
But...
Say that's a "signature". There are only "n" so many places you can put the null-check that will work properly.
Say you can list "m" such things. Then, at most, you can categorise every programmer into one of m x n groups (and, in fact, you might find that certain m's and n's go hand-in-hand, etc.).
So, if you have something like github - that has 11 million users and 30m repos at last count. Let's assume that most of those 11 million users, then, are programmers that commit code. You'd need to find over 3000 such signatures, each with 3000 possibilities. Or several HUNDRED THOUSAND such signatures, each with a few hundred options.
Yes, you don't need to narrow down to an individual, but if you're going to use this to try to do - what? Convict malware authors? Then you need to be pretty certain. "Beyond reasonable doubt".
And I'd like to point out that I've committed code that I didn't actually write, or that I tweaked from others in minor ways to fit my preferred style. So there's all kinds of complications.
This is bunkem and bollocks. It's about as scientific as starsigns, as useful as "smelling" the code to see if you can detect a whiff of the programmer's body odour, and as admissible as graphology.
And, if I thought I was writing malware, I can tell you now that I'd do everything I could to disguise the origins of the code, including coding style. I'd make it as boring and non-personal as possible. And likely anything I do would be optimised to oblivion by any compiler anyway.
Because... it's just not that fragile?
On a hard disk, you had to keep the power up to keep the motor spinning or not-one-byte would be written to disk in the correct position.
On SSD, it's either got voltage to write, or not. At worst, you run a chkdsk on it.
But I have to echo all the other sentiment here - why the fuck are you worried about the storage devices during power loss? Much more problematic is what it's doing to the rest of the hardware, and in general.
And fixed by a $100 UPS, or the "automatic" UPS of using a laptop, tablet or smartphone (P.S. smartphones, laptops, tablets, et al are MUCH MORE likely to just run out of battery before they can shut down safely if they are allowed to run low - how do you think they cope?)
I'm guessing you've read some overblown articles about shitty hardware, in outages that a hard drive wouldn't survive either, from people who don't bother with a UPS or backups.
Try it yourself, buy an SSD (hell, mirror it to a spinning disk if you want), see what happens.
But, to be honest, just buy / use a UPS and stop worrying about it. They aren't that fragile, anyway.
If you had any care for email privacy anyway, you'd buy a stupendously cheap domain, activate forwarding on the catch-all, and then use a bunch of one-time addresses.
I know what address I gave Steam. I know it's never been spammed. Because only they and I know what it was. If it does get spammed, someone hacked Steam, or me, or something like this happened.
So I then generate another address, change my steam email to that, block the now-public one, and carry on with my life.
The problem with people who claim the sky is falling is that they never stop to think about how to stop it falling on them.
Stop fucking with electrical devices that control mains water inlet into your house.
Seriously.
And I echo all the "one setting" / "won't happen" posts here. You probably can't (often there's a microcontroller but pissing about with them nowadays is almost impossible. Even simple PIC chips can be made "write-once" very easily and often are. The whole ELM327 clone market came about because of one chip not protecting it's code and it no doubt destroyed profits overnight.
Even if you DO get a firmware from it, reverse-engineering it is a lot of pissing about. Even if you get a replacement firmware / modifiable firmware / emulated board back into the device, what do you think it's going to be able to do? Activate pump. Deactivate pump. Activate heater. Deactivate heater. Open valve. Close valve. That's about it. You might be able to play with timings and temperatures but more likely you'll have several months of flooding your kitchen, blowing the fuses and/or setting the place on fire by running over-spec.
And what could you gain? Very, very, very slightly cleaner dishes. Possibly.
There's a reason that the washing machine market is nearly 100 years old, and yet in all the time that it's been electrical (I remember large rotary electromechanical switches on a washing machine, etc.) or electronic, nobody really bothers to make "clone" spare parts for those things. They rarely go wrong (the pumps themselves? That's another matter). Rarely can be tinkered with in any significant way. Rarely would be worth the time, effort and liability to play with.
Those are shit ways to program, granted.
But it could just be that one of their database instances is out of sync with another, causing one request for a webpage to retrieve several different (and then cached) bits of information for entirely different users. What was user 27 on one database might not be on the other, so you end up logging in as you, but getting Fred's language, and George's wishlist, etc.
Just because you can think of bad ways to program, doesn't mean they are the only possible cause. Steam is a massive place, that has successfully survived an intrusion because it did properly encrypt and hash all relevant data in the past, and which makes heavy use of distributed servers and content delivery networks.
Under DDoS conditions - as suspected to have precluded this problem, it's quite possible some database server has got out of sync, been corrupted while being shut-down or improperly synchronised, or even just filled up and no longer able to properly replicate the global database.
So I'm still voting for some guy who gets to vote for anything - even something completely against what I want?
That's still not democracy.
(P.S. also the reason I don't vote - one 70-millionth of a vote for a local head, that I've never been able to meet or speak to, of a well-funded party of which only two are contenders and only three have ever been in power, which results in one of the parties being elected based on how many areas they win - not how many votes they got overall - which is then used to justify every action performed under their name for the next four years, even if that's a complete u-turn on what was said before the election, with no possibility to revert or change the vote or vote for "anyone" - i.e. me? Why can't I vote for me? Or my friend that I trust to do the right thing?)
And all that happens is that everyone turns up for the "Do we hang this guy who might have touched a kid in the past but we're not sure and the judiciary can't decide?" vote (and turn a political issue into an emotional / media / vigilante one) , and no fucker turns up for the "Should we contribute to European agriculture laws into which someone has shoehorned GCHQ's latest attempt to screw us all over" vote because nobody can understand it.
You're away on holiday.
An important vote you care about gets put up.
You want to change your vote, but can't because of whatever reason (no Internet, etc.)
Do you end up voting by default the way you voted last time? Or do you have to put in a vote between a certain window?
Oops. You either have a stupid situation, or you're back to the old way of voting.
Not to mention that it requires electronic voting which - in any significant amount - is still not as provable, prevalent or as tamper-proof as it could be.
"Ob so le se nc e is Just a 12-Letter Word"
Really?
Ignore.
Filter the alert emails from that ISP if necessary.
Get on with life.
(P.S. Just double-check you put it on the block list).
Run any internet server in any datacenter in the world and you get this times a thousand. You can't trace them all. Hell, you can't even spend the time to trace all those spam email attempts you would get either.
What, precisely, do you think is being done to your connection that's worth the time and effort to even follow-up on it? A few packets hitting a firewall that is set to block and deny them any further access anyway?
Get a life, honestly. And turn off alert emails for port-scans. Turn on proper IDS/IPS, but turn off that particular alert because - well - it happens all the time anyway and it isn't going to stop just because you stop one IP range.
Spend the time you save on double-checking that people can't get into even the open services that you do offer to the net (SMTP, NTP, etc. if relevant). Whether you respond open or close, or whether the firewall rejects or allows, the requests still means that the packet was send, received, acted on, and replied to (or not, as the case may be). And in terms of your overall connection it's going to be like 0.001% of your traffic, if that.
Then go and work in any static-IP, Internet-facing network department that runs in-house services like webservers, VPN, email, etc. And notice that they just wouldn't care and don't have the time to do anything about such trivial shite.
I'm sure if the US genuinely doesn't want the tourism, many other parts of the world will rock up to fill that demand.
Not really.
The US - and any other country in the world - has the power to stop people entering official flights into their country. It's quite a basic right. We're actually considering it now for Donald Trump.
It's not that the UK "cooperated" with this or anything. The US refused them entry to a flight to the US. I've seen similar things done because the guy in question was someone who didn't have an official visa who they suspected of working illicitly, so they threw him out of the US before and we wasn't able to even book a flight to the US without the airline refusing / refunding his money a few days later. No matter what airline.
Give it a few more months and a few more gaffes and Donald Trump will be in the same position. The UK flights will deny him boarding even if the US airports let him through security right to the gate, etc.
MOD need specialist support to play now. Plus they need to be made by the original music creator - they capture each instrument individually and, as such, many things you might want to do you can't, and the mod player is responsible for decoding, timing, etc. which is an overhead.
MID technically needs hardware support or software instruments to play - and never quite sounds the same. The storage size doesn't include the software instruments - It was 45Mb last time I downloaded a soundfont for a soundcard. Plus they need to be made by the original music creator, and can't have various effects and changes done to them.
MP3 etc. are just sound recordings, not music formats, and are the final composition, layered with other instruments, effects, etc. Library support is pretty universal.
Graphics don't scale as nicely as you might think. Like fonts, you can't just scale up or down unless the original is vector. And then you have to process them and people complain that a game with a few boxes slows to a crawl when a lot of enemies are on-screen or requires a long startup time to rasterise them all in the right size first, or requires a 3D card with hundreds of megs of texture memory to hold them all.
Don't forget that nowadays, just the SDL library is several megabytes. It's supports all kinds of things that didn't even exist back in the 8-bit days. Hell SDL_TTF rendering requires a large library, plus FreeType, plus a font (the DejaVu fonts are 600Kb each or thereabouts). Sure, this is all "wastage" and you could just encode a bitmap font. For every possible screen resolution. Or run in fixed resolution. Like the 320x240's (or even half that) of the 8-bit era. Everytime you double a resolution, you QUADRUPLE the storage size required. So today's 1900x1200 screens require a lot more sprites to fill them and a lot more detail in those sprites to not look shit, and a lot more storage to hold it all.
There are reasons that things grew. I grew up in the 48Kb era. Have you looked at things like the Skool Daze disassembly. Fuck spending all that time squeezing that stuff into individual bits and still ended up with a ten-screen game because of memory restrictions.
Don't forget the amount of libraries that are sucked in to any simple program now. Dozens of megs for something as simple as calculator. Everything comes back to MSVCRT and a ton of Windows DLL's. On Linux, everything needs libc, and a bucket of support libraries and devices.
The reason it's so much more is because computers do so much more. And in terms of programming, I'd rather they spent time on making the game rather than pissing about optimising the graphics format for a 2D platformer. As it is they are short of people, short of code, lagging in development - and you want them to spend an age pissing about prematurely optimising shit using obsolete formats for the sake of some bit-level purism? That's a sure way to lose every developer on the project.
Especially compared to "#include " and just getting started straight away, even if that drags in megabytes of libraries that almost EVERY game written today uses.
Where? When?
Because my Facebook account still requires me to click-to-enable-plugin to view the videos.
Maybe he should get his employer (Adobe) to get rid of that shitty sidebar that only disappears if you click the word Tools (despite no indication that's what's active) and which comes back every time you restart Acrobat Reader.
No to mention the billion-and-one things that can pop over the top of your PDF. Or the services, scheduled tasks, taskbar icons, startup entries, etc. that are recreated all the fucking time even when you disable them and tell it not to update. Or the horrendous options dialogs that hide all the options.
People who live in glass houses...
Because there's more to life than games?
When you have a business with lots of money invested into a piece of code that runs your business, is custom, and can only be tinkered with by high-end and expensive coders, your money may well be better invested in getting it working on Wine than either porting it (a MASSIVE task that far too many people underestimate) or patching it (and thus playing with the program and potentially breaking it).
Lots of people are stuck on Windows programs - it's easy to say "they shouldn't have stuck on Windows, then" but that's not the way life works. You don't set out creating a massive, cross-platform, idealised, perfectly-programmed application from the start. That's like saying "let's just build all this airport in modular fashion so we can expand and change its use and rejig its layout - it'll cost ten times more at the start, but will save us money in the long run" - perfectly sensible, but never, ever going to be approved by any budgetary committee.
I was running Office on both Crossover and Wine for years. It more than does its job. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than even trying to get old XP apps working on, say, Windows 10 (and no, don't just say "You shouldn't be doing that" - this is not how things work).
Games are an entirely different matter. For a start, there is a limit on the number of resources available to the 3D APIs, and many games pushed those limits. Now, trying to "emulate" those games means working around those limits while staying WITHIN those limits yourself, which can cause a lot of problems. We're still dealing with games using direct-rendering mode here, for instance.
And games move and evolve so quickly that being able to run even the last few years of games on a platform never intended to be developed for, is fucking amazing. But that's not the purpose of Wine.
No. If you want games on Linux, ask the developers to port their games to Linux. You'll see significantly LESS joy than getting those games running on Wine. I assure you.
I suggest Apple sue the arse off of Have I Got News For You (a BBC TV comedy program, that focuses on political humour, and isn't afraid to take the piss out of current news articles, politicians, and even invites them on to stand their ground - one of the regular guests is Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, who's been sued multiple times for defamation and libel and very rarely loses... the magazine itself is the origin of the Arkell v. Pressdram case (Google it!)).
Only last week, the implication that Apple was avoiding tax was made on the show (joking that the bite out of the Apple logo was "the bit where the tax should be"), laughed at, and broadcast. Strange, then, that Apple haven't made a fuss or a statement about that, isn't it?
It's easy to make a lot of money if you don't pay the proper taxes. Until the laws changes and it catches up with you. A few companies in the EU are finding that out at the moment. Luxembourg looks likely to no longer be the EU tax haven it once was.
Gosh. Guess Valve bringing out a Steam controller with all kinds of customisability and the ability to have as many buttons as you like (customisable pads, shoulder buttons, etc.) is a waste of time then?
Or you could plug in an XBox 360 controller - the USB adaptors for the PC are literally a few pence now - and have four buttons, four shoulders, D-pad, two thumbsticks, etc.?
Steam know that some things are keyboard/mouse, some are joystick, some are "joypad" (as they were called in my day) and some are steering wheel / other specialist controllers. That's why they released one of their own joypads and made the entire product navigable using just that from your TV.
What's wrong with a port forward?
Get them to tell you THEIR static IP, and only apply port forwarding from their address to your internal VLAN.
Problem solved.
Have to do it all the time for telephony, CCTV, remote software support, etc. I let them have a port-forward but only if:
a) they give me their source IP (I get the asked the same when I set up VPN's etc. anyway, so everyone does this!)
b) they only get one set of port-fowards to the internal system
c) I reserve the right to cut that connection off for 99.9% of the time until they actually NEED to do something. They ring me up, I open up JUST THAT PORT to JUST THAT IP, then they have to tell me when they are finished.
It makes it much easier to manage, to log, and to control your devices.
Nobody sensible opens up any port to the world unless they have a public-facing service on that port and have secured it properly (e.g. email, web, vpn). But "port-forward" does not mean you let the world into it.
And if the attackers know and can spoof the IP of your remote support, then you're in bigger trouble anyway! That's not the kind of attacker that you're going to be able to easily defend against. But with a plain port-forward, all they'll get (if you've done it properly) is into the VLAN and the cameras, not your systems.
And, guess what. The only device that traverses several VLANs should really be your gateway anyway. There's no point VLANning off and then having everything sit on all the VLANs. So you might as well just have the gateway port-forward and then all the config is on one device.
(Not only that, VPN setup like you suggest is a pain in the arse for most people anyway. If you have a hundred customers, with a hundred VPN's, it quickly becomes stupendous to put them all on 24/7, because of IP subnets stomping over each other and all sorts of confusions. That's before you get into the million-and-one variations of VPN and VPN settings and managing certs and credentials).
Ah, you mean "defeated by any trivial filter".
Security through obscurity (which is what this is) is doomed to fail. It *can* work, for short periods, when it's unexpected, when people aren't really looking (how many people just have a "secret URL" on their blog to get into the admin interface so that it's not publicly visible - doesn't stop people finding it), etc.
But anything like this? Pointless. And one academic getting careless with encryption even once would likely see them sacked in such a place.
It's not at all hard with a brief packet capture to find some common element or even trace a particular conversation of interest in - quite literally - seconds. Hell, I run a small commercial network and we transfer Terabytes over it every single day. Just that sheer volume is more obfuscation than anything else. Have you seen how long it takes to store those kinds of packet captures and apply filters when you're talking dozens of terabytes of data? Nothing to do with crafting them, that's a Wireshark tutorial and ten minutes. But actually applying them needs a lot of data filtering.
But, still, I call bullshit. They're just playing at it if they are really doing that for that purpose. It would be the work of a moment to immediately alert someone and discard any unencrypted packets on such a network. Generating costly fake traffic that gets in your way, slows things down, and could bollocks up your own data investigations? Pointless.
Yes, but you, your kids, your spouse, your visitors, etc. can all do that at the same time without slowing down. As video streaming is taking off, you can all stream in HD without stuttering.
And, sorry, but every fecking website on the planet - virtually - can easily swamp a 100Mbps connection at the other end, on demand, whenever it's necessary. Most of the time my servers are sitting bog-idle in their datacentre, even with thousands of hits coming in. It's only when I deliberately transfer, say, a 1Gb file up or down that I see that line full.
As people move to AWS, etc. that situation only get better. It's rarely the server that's the bottleneck. It's rarely the client that's the bottleneck. The bottleneck is slap-bang in the middle - the ISP and their upstream.
Which is what makes me dubious here. Every customer gets 100Mb guaranteed? That's one fucking hell of an upload connection they are promising there. 10 customers is a Gigabit leased line somewhere. 1000 customers is 100 Gigabit. The numbers get silly VERY quickly. And that's the MINIMUM they need.
I want to know who they are peering with at Tb/s "for free"... because that's one hell of a deal.
However, I suspect - as ever - that the servers at Google, Facebook, YouTube et al are perfectly capable of pushing multiple 4K streams your way at max speed, and your local net and maybe even local connection are capable of similar speeds for data to other local machines, and the ISP is "capable" of similar speeds but they never actually achieve them because they have limited peering, bottlenecks, limits, rate-limits and throttling, because the thinnest piece of pipe is actually the one that connects THEM and their thousands of customers to the Net.
They don't need to heat up a gas. They need to heat up one atom at a time. Or a handful at most.
As such, the amount of energy to get it to millions of degrees is almost nothing. The only reason your bath takes so long to heat up is because of the AMOUNT of water you need heated. Even a few extra litres can take measurably longer to heat (e.g. shower vs bath efficiency).
But with fusion, when you pop that atom, you get more energy out than you put in. The actual problem is not in "how do you get that hot" but "how do you stop it just getting hotter". Same with fission reactors - the energy given to the particle which is blasting apart the large atoms there is humungous, but more worrying is how do you stop the runaway reaction.
Answer: Control the fuel very carefully so there's not a risk of damage to the tons of lead or whatever surrounding it, and put lots of stuff in the way.
What temperature do you think ordinary fission reactors run at every day in their cores? Or large laser projects?
Apart from the fact that things like ceramics can sustain incredible temperatures en-masse (far more than anything a metal can, or you wouldn't be able to cast a lot of metals!), yet "bake" in a kiln of other a few thousand degrees to get like that in the first place.
But,yes, they hold a TINY reaction for a handful of atoms that even if you dropped it into your hand would be cooled almost immediately by the billions of atoms it touched en-route, and they keep it in a magnetic field so it's never touching anything, and they surround the experiment in a large mass of materials more than capable of taking the heat.
"Temperature" is really an average of all the atoms in the local area. So even with one atom at a million degrees, in a cup full of water, there are so many cooler atoms that the average temperature of the whole system won't diverge noticeably from room temperature at all.
Same way that "water" becomes "steam" at 100 degrees - but the hundreds of degrees happens in tiny contained areas for a handful of molecules of water which generates a tiny amount for steam which bubbles to the surface and dissipates - and that can happen for ten minutes before the majority of the water in the pan is actually BOILING itself.
Not in the UK:
https://www.gov.uk/capital-gai...
Which is why I prefixed my post as not knowing if such was applicable in Australia.