Hell, I have an "computer" next me to capable of connecting to the Internet (even to act as HTTP server, DHCP client, NTP client, etc.), controlling relays, performing some computations, etc. It has 32Kb of Flash, 2Kb of SRAM and 1Kb of EEPROM. It's called an Arduino UNO.
By comparison, then, 32Mb is over 1000 times more than needed for IoT crap.
And we'll force them to comply with the law. If they want to "marry" people (I know churches in the UK generally DO NOT, that's for the marriage registrar, not the church), they have to comply with the law.
In the same way that just because a religion believes it can stone adulterous women still can't do that if the law says it's not allowed.
However, as noted above, churches do NOT marry people. They perform a religious ceremony that some people call a wedding. That's very different to an actual "marriage".
Hint: Most people who disagree with religion or who do not want some religious arse telling them whether or not they can marry, they won't be going to that church or wanting that dickhead to ruin their day anyway.
However, that said, recently an Irish company was sued for failing to produce a cake promoting gay marriage. They lost. The argument was that they were a business and a business can't be religious or discriminatory - even if the owners are. That's the shape of the future for you.
Hey, did you know that Mother's Day was supposed to be to celebrate your Mother Church and nothing to do with your biological mother? Things change. And slowly religion stops being relevant.
First reaction to your post: Ahhahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahaha!
Second reaction:
"never define marriage as anything but between a man and women."... or a man and several women. Or a man, several women and a "boy". Whose purpose was... buggery, basically. You really need to pick up a history book sometime.
And even if "every" civilisation in history had condemned this - THEY ARE FUCKING HISTORICAL CIVILISATIONS. Until a couple of hundred years ago (yes), people were still shitting in the corner of the room in some countries, and shirt-tails were to wipe your arse on.
Welcome to modern civilisation. Where we look at shit and don't necessarily just do it "because my ancestors did". It's not perfect either, but hopefully our kids will look at our own cock-ups and say "Fuck doing that, just because my predecessors did, it's obviously fucking moronic."
We've been systematically exposed to murder, rape, fraud, theft, and every other crime imaginable since the day we were born. Tom and Jerry, Wile E Coyote, etc. used to "kill" each other with mallets, dynamite, whatever was to hand. Games have gone from pixels touching to realistic 3D representations of killing prostitutes while the in-game characters whine about how they got in their way, "bitch".
And yet STILL, roughly the same percentage of people ever commit those kinds of crimes. Still, in some countries, crime figures are going DOWN per person, not up.
My grandfather's generation witnessed wholesale murder and genocide the same as I do - they were sent to deal with it, unprepared and unaware, and many of them never returned from battle the same. The same could be said of their grandfathers. And the same could be said of the war in Iraq, the war on terror, Vietnam, whatever war you want to pick.
Death is a horrible, but inevitable, part of life. Witnessing death may allow you to cope with further death more easily, but it does not turn you into a murderer on its own. I'd hate to know that a kid who lead a sheltered life and never experienced violence throughout it is suddenly thrown into even a street mugging without knowledge of how that might go. It can destroy people - I've seen it happen.
Yet those who suffer the most gory of horror films, witness the worst of the Internet, actively plough through it and seek out something that others might find abhorrent? They are not automatically immune to the effects of such things happening in real life yet can cope with it much easier if it happens.
Children who have NEVER been exposed to swearing form their own. Swearing is as natural an outburst of suppressed frustration as crying. People who do not swear are, in my head, either a) lying or b) scare the absolute fucking shit out of me.
People who aren't exposed to rudeness cannot understand that it's possible, or how to deal with it, or why they should play the game that others - now demonstrably in front of them - have never.
People exposed to violence are no different. I grew up not in a ghetto with bullets whizzing past my head, but in a rough area of London. I grew up with fights in the playground, and outside it, as a natural part of childhood (for that area). I, however, am a well-adjusted adult. I work for schools (and, therefore, have not committed these kinds of things as an adult). I can sit through the goriest of movies (whether it's actually just gore, however, and boring as fuck, or the gore is just part of the otherwise-good movie is a bigger question to my entertainment of it). And I've seen violence.
Yet, when there's blood, and violence in real-life, it's me that ends up phoning for help, stepping in, acting with a clear head. Everyone else is too shocked to do anything about it in time and just wants to get away from it. A good survival tactic, maybe, but not the way to handle it.
As stated for everything from your parent's smoking (my mother smoked incessantly basically from her pregnancy with me to today), parent's drinking (my father worked in a brewery and used to be paid in beer tokens so we were never without alcohol), your friend's jumping off bridges, your video games depicting violence, your movies trivialising abhorrent crimes, etc. JUST BECAUSE YOU SEE IT DOES NOT MEAN YOU WILL DO IT.
You have to be seriously maladjusted for something you witness to cause you to perform that same, or similar, acts as an a
Because Chrome is turning Java off and they're trying to make sure other browsers don't follow suit.
Seriously, I see no NEED for Java any more. I probably have more Silverlight things I like to use than I do Java, and neither are vital any more.
And the sooner we get out of the mindset of ancient-java-plugin being accepted as "more secure" for banking etc. the better. Hell, I remember the early days of the secure web where if you couldn't afford SSL, you pushed the transactions through a "secure" Java app.
What do you NEED Java for nowadays? What do you NEED enough of it to justify a control panel icon, background services, etc.? Basically nothing. As such, Java is dead in the water, and a major browser ditching it could be the end.
However, as some of the comments on here show, it won't be missed.
It does make me wonder, however, quite what Oracle have left - Java is dead, MySQL is dead, OpenOffice is dead, etc. Seems like they bought these things, did nothing with them, then let them all die (some quite publicly) and gained nothing by it.
I can only imagine they thought there was a lawsuit or patent in there that was worth billions. Maybe that was the impetus for the whole Java/Dalvik thing? All that did was kill off Java and its derivatives even more.
So they have to find some news to keep the name of the language alive.
Indeed - the whole point of full-disk encryption is that "reset" really consists of "zero the place where the master key was stored, which was encrypted by the user passphrase".
Do that, and do that effectively, and you don't have to touch ANYTHING else - it all becomes random gibberish without a valid key. It could literally mean just keeping a couple of hundred bytes of RAM in an EEPROM and then destroying it on "factory reset".
For convenience of detection, however, you may want to zero the first few sectors of the storage so that filesystem probes see it as "no filesystem" rather than as random gibberish. But that's got zero impact on the data that WAS within it.
There's a reason that everything before 4.4 was third-party encryption and untrusted. There's a reason that proper, system-level full storage encryption (including SD card encryption) required changes to the OS. Since then, however, you just need to make sure nobody has your passphrase to stop them getting into your device. Then make sure that nobody has the passphrase-encrypted key blocks at the beginning of the disk (usually) and the data is nothing more than random gibberish.
About the only thing needing a complete wipe of all data is really if you're put into duress to provide a key (which would obviously then provide the data) or if a key is discovered and someone wishes to prove that you DID hold the key / data (by provably decrypting with that key to show that it must have been the right one and, maybe, therefore that you had knowledge of it).
Wipe the key-block, and the encrypted data is basically undecryptable. Same way TrueCrypt etc. work. And even though your passphrase may only be 10 characters, the key block might well be hundreds of bytes long and THAT's what actually has to be decrypted first in order to get the real key to decrypt the rest of the data.
A quick Google just now shows that just about any Samsung device from the Galaxy Fit to the Ace to the main phones has ALREADY had some distro retro-fitted to it. Android IS Linux, it's just that the interface isn't Gnome or KDE and the application format isn't ELF binary but Dalvik etc.
It's just an ARM device. As such, running a mainstream distro on a Galaxy device is probably orders of magnitude EASIER than pissing about trying to build a board that fits into an old case... and gives you the same result if you bother to tinker with it (or if there's a single project in the world that's already tinkered with it for you to customise to phone).
In the same way, I can emulate almost any Android phone with VirtualBox etc. setups on my PC - they are just standard ARM Linux devices at the end of the day.
The iPad? I'm completely anti-apple but there's no reason why not, but I imagine it would be much harder work.
But running a Linux distro on a Samsung phone?
1) You already are, it's just been pared back to the phone basics. 2) Yes, you can already do exactly that.
One Google it took and DOZENS of projects popped up that have done exactly that.
And, since then, almost every Internet service I use has started bringing their stuff out of the US. Not saying that makes us "hack-proof" (not least from our own intelligence agencies) but businesses can't do business with other governments or even large corporations if this kind of thing is suspected to be going on.
Every week or so, another large company tells me that they've pulled all their EU users and their data to their Ireland datacentre so that only the US people's data can be "collected" by the US authorities and otherwise the NSA are just the same as any other foreign hostile entity trying to get into their systems.
DropBox was the latest one I got an email from. The government and education services already do everything in-EU anyway because of a lovely thing called the Data Protection Act (which the US really needs to start adopting its own version of), and now even people's photo-sharing sites are doing the same because they just don't want this kind of stuff reflecting on them because they happen to do business in the US too.
Tell me, people, if China were doing this everybody would be up in arms. But because it's the US, it's okay?
All they've done is made everybody go from "Maybe the NSA could do this if they wanted" to "We have to assume they are doing this, all day, every day, no matter what the law says", move their data abroad, and massively increase awareness of security and encryption.
Hell, I'm now suspicious of Elliptic Curve, especially if it relies on published curve parameters rather than them being an inherently configurable part of the exchange (like Diffie-Helman - agree on a curve that nobody has used before but has certain properties and then use that as the basis for encryption) - I have a feeling that all the push to move on COULD be a cleverly orchestrated move to something such agencies "approve" of in secret even if they say it causes them problems in public.
When you think the trick is happening, maybe it's already been done...
0.5Gb internal storage. The Galaxy phone I point at can put a microSD in too - it's not quite the same as saying that it's got that as primary internal storage. And that Galaxy has 1Gb internal storage. My point is that YOU pay for the microSD. The device INCLUDE the internal storage in the price. And you get less with this device, for more cost.
And again, my point is cost. If you can get off-the-shelf components to do something similar for VASTLY reduced prices, then you have to wonder what you're paying for. If you can get a Samsung phone - with roughly the same makeup and components for 1/5th the price, and if you can build stuff with similar chips for similar purposes (even including LCD touchscreens, etc.) that use open-standards to communicate and no "hidden firmware" for a pittance - again, what are you PAYING for with this device?
This isn't how much things like this cost, clearly. Maybe the BOARD is more expensive, as it's custom. Maybe a PARTICULAR screen is more expensive as it's in limited supply. But the overall device? It's a bog-standard phone. Quite what "unfree" firmware does a commercial device like a Galaxy have once you've rooted the Android install on it? Pretty much the same as this device - the GSM chip will have a proprietary firmware to ensure radio compliance.
And if not, how much would it cost to replace, say, the GPS functionality on the Samsung with an "open" replacement? Again, nowhere NEAR the cost of this device (which is basically doing something similar by relying on the manufacturing for a previous device to provide the baseline).
In runs of one and tens, yes, maybe this price is reasonable. In runs of 100's and 1000's - no.. it's really not. Not in the age of ubiquitous fast low-power common-bus chips for all these functions.
This reminds me of the open-graphics-card initiatives. The time spent on starting from scratch (and inevitably relying on some closed piece of hardware at the end anyway) means that by the time it comes along few are interested, the costs are enormous, the parts are hard to obtain and the device quickly becomes obsolete (the project that springs to mind was still advertising PCI-only functionality just a year ago, not even PCIe). And it's based on FGPA's that you have to buy from a commercial vendor that doesn't publish their designs...
I'm a purchaser of niche products. I have a GP2X and some of its predecessors and successors, I programmed for it, it was built in tiny runs, cost more than equivalents, and was quickly obsoleted by commercial devices but it was "open" - it was ARM chips with a Linux install that you could code down to the bootloader.
5 times the cost of a (pretty expensive) commercial device that does the same and has the support of a major international company is a lot to ask for a niche product that doesn't do anything "special" (any Android machine, by definition, could run a plain Linux install if you so wanted to do that), is reliant on finding parts from old phones, and needs a tiny production run meaning you probably can never get the parts for it again if it goes wrong.
I'm not against the idea, here. I'm against the execution. There are cheaper phones that have bog-standard hardware that you can replace any firmware with open-firmware if you needed to (or even the entire functionality of that particular feature with another free equivalent) and put them in a case. In fact, here, the case is the CHEAP part. That's the part you could easily redesign to shove any board taken from a phone into. The electronics for a hobby project, however, is never going to get near the cost, reliability, even safety of a commercial product re-purposed.
The ideal isn't mine, particularly, but the execution seems incredibly poor is that's the closest you can get to price-point. Double-the-cost, maybe. FIVE TIMES is ludicrous.
But... the main communications chip still has a closed source firmware. So, actually.. what's changed? Sure, you can turn the radio off but that kinda defeats the point of having a phone.
"According to current calculations, the cost of the motherboard should be somewhere around 990 EUR. The complete device will cost about 150 EUR more, depending on prices and availability of N900 spare parts."
Holy cow, freedom (at least partial freedom) comes at a seriously hefty price. That's five times the cost of a half-decent Samsung Galaxy (S4 or S4 Mini, not network-locked), where I'm from.
And for 1GHz, 1Gb RAM, 0.5Gb storage. That's not even close to the spec of the above Samsung.
Pay five times the cost, get less back, and the possibility of component shortage making repair/replacement impossible.
How do this stack up against the $9 CHIP project, etc. with its processor? I can build a GSM "phone" with Wifi, SD, touchscreen etc. from Arduino shields for way, way, way less than this costs on top of that.
I mean, for God's sake, they've bothered to put IrDA and FM radio on it!
Niche doesn't even begin to cover it. When you're more expensive than Apple, and can't do anywhere near as much, you know that you're onto a loser.
I have any number of old disks but just sitting and ISO'ing them would take forever. Shipping costs would also be prohibitive.
However, I would be interested in finding a few old DOS utils that I used to have, and several of those old "we send you a floppy catalogue, you create an order, send the floppy back and we send you the shareware you ordered" services that had the weirdest of things that you couldn't get hold of anywhere else.
Interactive touchscreens now, and short-throw projectors directly above the board.
And it's a standard part of a UK teacher job interview to do a lesson on an interactive whiteboard. You can't escape it and teacher-training prepares you for it.
It's quite literally an all-day-every-day tool in every school I've ever worked in.
I work in schools, I'd love to move to key authentication to save all the "kids forgetting their password / stealing their friends password" hassle (physical items are more difficult to lose or "steal" without getting into more trouble!) but the costs are still FUCKING ludicrous for any such solution and two-thirds of that cost is just software and nothing to do with the devices at all. Still struggling to justify this:
The software to put this into AD logins (which is what most businesses use to tie all their stuff together and do the simplest of logins) is $48/user. Plus $25/user for the key. That's nearly $30k just to get a small school logged on with the system. By the time you buy spares, train users, tie it into your systems, etc. you're looking at a $50k project at least. That's the IT budget gone. Just to replace a password with the simplest of login dongles.
And when 2/3rds of that is software (not hardware) which you just have to hope is available for the next version of your OS (GINA logins went the way of the dodo already), works on the servers when you have an emergency and need to login, hope it works for things like kids logging into school websites from home (or even remote desktop, etc.)... it's stupendously expensive for such a simple thing.
I can't justify paying that much for the one-off cost of writing the software to login.
These ideas are great - would love to deploy them and will gladly pay a lot of money for them. But having the device isn't even 1% of the problem. The software, the ongoing compatibility, etc. consume most of the costs and there's no guarantee at all as the system expands.
I'd much rather pay for the keys and then pay even a few thousand a year for some licensed software to sort out the in-between parts. But everything is either needing a smartcard reader on every PC (useless in tablet environments and remote logins from home) or - more likely - stupendously expensive software.
Cygwin works well until you get other programs that use it. You either have to install them within your Cygwin install folder (and hope they are able to cope with Cygwin updates you make, e.g. to Cygwin 2) or suffer DLL hell. Look at the Cygwin FAQ for ".DLL" - if you're not familiar with those errors already, you haven't used Cygwin very much. Now consider across a bunch of workstations on a network.
"Want say tunneling to a Windows service? If you use Windows only as a client...."
Don't. Use a proper tool. PuTTY is a client, not a server. This is like saying that ssh-client is no good at being sshd,.. of course not. But that's not what we're talking about.
And the fact is that for every SSH server set up (properly), you probably have 10-100 clients joining to it or you wouldn't bother setting it up. And one of the main points of things like SSH servers is cross-compile farms and remote access. And almost all the universities that offer such services recommend PuTTY if you're on Windows (because they've dealt with the Cygwin issues, I assure you, and decided it's not worth the hassle).
Opinion, of course. So's yours. Just because it's contrary doesn't make it more or less valid.
However, PuTTY is widely used and recommended for everything from talking to your Arduino's over a serial port to logging into your University server... go take a look. Cygwin - if and when it comes up - is not mentioned in nearly as many places for such simple actions.
Cygwin is, in fact, overkill for the majority of users who just want to use SSH, telnet or serial services from Windows. If they wanted Linux, generally they end up installing it in preference to Cygwin.
Most schools in London (and throughout the UK) already have interactive whiteboards in every classroom.
So, to be fair, it's no more difficult to doodle on them than an ordinary whiteboard. But you can't go to Google and doodle over the diagram on a pen-only board.
And the most popular brand, SmartBoard, have Linux drivers and software. Nobody ever uses that, because schools get Microsoft (and, no, they don't have humongous discounts or kickbacks - MS licensing is one of my biggest budget items every year).
So if you're already on Microsoft and already on whiteboards, it's dumb to suggest going back to pencil and paper for the majority of your teaching / learning.
Personally, I don't get why we bother to spend years teaching kids to write with a pen when they still struggle with maths and science into their teen years. Teach them block capitals, move on.
(Please note, my comments may not reflect the opinion of any of my employers, past or present - but to be honest, the way things are moving, it's that huge a leap to suggest it. This September, we're starting to roll out individual iPads to the kids.)
That's just because they compiled without specifying the build number.
That's LITERALLY a ten-second fix and recompile to resolve.
Don't identify software / spam / viruses by "it has X feature that's easily copied", whether that's a registry entry, a process name or an arbitrary string.
Publish the damn checksums at a minimum, or GPG signing key ideallly.
CygWin is a damn nightmare, especially if you have other software that uses it.
It suffers from enormous "DLL Hell" problems when it has multiple versions trying to load and if you use programs that use older versions of Cygwin, they don't necessarily run at all in co-existence with programs using newer versions. "Cygwin1.dll" exists is so many different versions that it's almost impossible to manage properly.
I used to develop on Windows with Eclipse and Cygwin. I quickly moved to MinGW because silly things like random games, utilities, etc. that use it would interfere with the version I was developing against.
If all you want is a real terminal on a GUI, Cygwin is total overkill. Not only that, if you use WinSCP as well, it will manage the keys for you properly between both programs so you don't even notice that you're using it.
Use *nix, or use Windows and PuTTY. For sure, as a network admin, I wouldn't let put Cygwin near your computers but I'll happily pre-install PuTTY for you (zero install needed, certainly no pissing about with PATH and multiple versions of the DLL etc.).
Any sort of COM port access. Any sort of SSH access. Any sort of SSH tunnelling access.
I work in IT, PuTTY is one of the first things I install in every workplace - not "just because" but I'll be damned if I'm going to SSH into a remote server's management module without it or try to use some junky HTTP/Java monstrosity to achieve what one command can achieve on the CLI.
Hell, I've diagnosed mail servers using it by telnetting to the mail port and issuing commands direct for a setting that some Exchange "experts" denied would ever affect anything - when you can show them the entire mail transaction live rather than some convoluted log that purports to tell you everything that happens on the email sending with a junky bounce error, it kinda hurts.
Sure, a lot of stuff is HTTP-managed nowadays but wait until Chrome removes Java and see if the other browsers follow suit. Because then you'll be back on the CLI quite quickly.
The last Cisco switch I installed came only with some absolutely worthless piece of software that only works if you have version X of IE etc. But SSH was a one-tick enable and I could do everything else from there.
Slashdot Mirror
"as little as 32 MB of RAM, for example"
I'm getting old.
My first full PC had 2MB of RAM.
My first computer had only 48Kb of RAM.
Hell, I have an "computer" next me to capable of connecting to the Internet (even to act as HTTP server, DHCP client, NTP client, etc.), controlling relays, performing some computations, etc. It has 32Kb of Flash, 2Kb of SRAM and 1Kb of EEPROM. It's called an Arduino UNO.
By comparison, then, 32Mb is over 1000 times more than needed for IoT crap.
Marriage pre-dates religion.
And we'll force them to comply with the law. If they want to "marry" people (I know churches in the UK generally DO NOT, that's for the marriage registrar, not the church), they have to comply with the law.
In the same way that just because a religion believes it can stone adulterous women still can't do that if the law says it's not allowed.
However, as noted above, churches do NOT marry people. They perform a religious ceremony that some people call a wedding. That's very different to an actual "marriage".
Hint: Most people who disagree with religion or who do not want some religious arse telling them whether or not they can marry, they won't be going to that church or wanting that dickhead to ruin their day anyway.
However, that said, recently an Irish company was sued for failing to produce a cake promoting gay marriage. They lost. The argument was that they were a business and a business can't be religious or discriminatory - even if the owners are. That's the shape of the future for you.
Hey, did you know that Mother's Day was supposed to be to celebrate your Mother Church and nothing to do with your biological mother? Things change. And slowly religion stops being relevant.
First reaction to your post: Ahhahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahaha!
Second reaction:
"never define marriage as anything but between a man and women."... or a man and several women. Or a man, several women and a "boy". Whose purpose was... buggery, basically. You really need to pick up a history book sometime.
And even if "every" civilisation in history had condemned this - THEY ARE FUCKING HISTORICAL CIVILISATIONS. Until a couple of hundred years ago (yes), people were still shitting in the corner of the room in some countries, and shirt-tails were to wipe your arse on.
Welcome to modern civilisation. Where we look at shit and don't necessarily just do it "because my ancestors did". It's not perfect either, but hopefully our kids will look at our own cock-ups and say "Fuck doing that, just because my predecessors did, it's obviously fucking moronic."
I disagree entirely.
We've been systematically exposed to murder, rape, fraud, theft, and every other crime imaginable since the day we were born. Tom and Jerry, Wile E Coyote, etc. used to "kill" each other with mallets, dynamite, whatever was to hand. Games have gone from pixels touching to realistic 3D representations of killing prostitutes while the in-game characters whine about how they got in their way, "bitch".
And yet STILL, roughly the same percentage of people ever commit those kinds of crimes. Still, in some countries, crime figures are going DOWN per person, not up.
My grandfather's generation witnessed wholesale murder and genocide the same as I do - they were sent to deal with it, unprepared and unaware, and many of them never returned from battle the same. The same could be said of their grandfathers. And the same could be said of the war in Iraq, the war on terror, Vietnam, whatever war you want to pick.
Death is a horrible, but inevitable, part of life. Witnessing death may allow you to cope with further death more easily, but it does not turn you into a murderer on its own. I'd hate to know that a kid who lead a sheltered life and never experienced violence throughout it is suddenly thrown into even a street mugging without knowledge of how that might go. It can destroy people - I've seen it happen.
Yet those who suffer the most gory of horror films, witness the worst of the Internet, actively plough through it and seek out something that others might find abhorrent? They are not automatically immune to the effects of such things happening in real life yet can cope with it much easier if it happens.
Children who have NEVER been exposed to swearing form their own. Swearing is as natural an outburst of suppressed frustration as crying. People who do not swear are, in my head, either a) lying or b) scare the absolute fucking shit out of me.
People who aren't exposed to rudeness cannot understand that it's possible, or how to deal with it, or why they should play the game that others - now demonstrably in front of them - have never.
People exposed to violence are no different. I grew up not in a ghetto with bullets whizzing past my head, but in a rough area of London. I grew up with fights in the playground, and outside it, as a natural part of childhood (for that area). I, however, am a well-adjusted adult. I work for schools (and, therefore, have not committed these kinds of things as an adult). I can sit through the goriest of movies (whether it's actually just gore, however, and boring as fuck, or the gore is just part of the otherwise-good movie is a bigger question to my entertainment of it). And I've seen violence.
The thing it does is allows you to deal with it. It does not numb you to it. And, to be honest, I'm probably one of those people who could quite easily be numb to it - I'm probably high up on the autism scale and, as my friends and family would agree, it's so obvious I don't need to go and be diagnosed as such. But, still, real-life violence is abhorrent and scary to me, even if "fake" violence in movies and games is - actually - quite humorous and blasé to myself.
Yet, when there's blood, and violence in real-life, it's me that ends up phoning for help, stepping in, acting with a clear head. Everyone else is too shocked to do anything about it in time and just wants to get away from it. A good survival tactic, maybe, but not the way to handle it.
As stated for everything from your parent's smoking (my mother smoked incessantly basically from her pregnancy with me to today), parent's drinking (my father worked in a brewery and used to be paid in beer tokens so we were never without alcohol), your friend's jumping off bridges, your video games depicting violence, your movies trivialising abhorrent crimes, etc. JUST BECAUSE YOU SEE IT DOES NOT MEAN YOU WILL DO IT.
You have to be seriously maladjusted for something you witness to cause you to perform that same, or similar, acts as an a
Because Chrome is turning Java off and they're trying to make sure other browsers don't follow suit.
Seriously, I see no NEED for Java any more. I probably have more Silverlight things I like to use than I do Java, and neither are vital any more.
And the sooner we get out of the mindset of ancient-java-plugin being accepted as "more secure" for banking etc. the better. Hell, I remember the early days of the secure web where if you couldn't afford SSL, you pushed the transactions through a "secure" Java app.
What do you NEED Java for nowadays? What do you NEED enough of it to justify a control panel icon, background services, etc.? Basically nothing. As such, Java is dead in the water, and a major browser ditching it could be the end.
However, as some of the comments on here show, it won't be missed.
It does make me wonder, however, quite what Oracle have left - Java is dead, MySQL is dead, OpenOffice is dead, etc. Seems like they bought these things, did nothing with them, then let them all die (some quite publicly) and gained nothing by it.
I can only imagine they thought there was a lawsuit or patent in there that was worth billions. Maybe that was the impetus for the whole Java/Dalvik thing? All that did was kill off Java and its derivatives even more.
So they have to find some news to keep the name of the language alive.
Indeed - the whole point of full-disk encryption is that "reset" really consists of "zero the place where the master key was stored, which was encrypted by the user passphrase".
Do that, and do that effectively, and you don't have to touch ANYTHING else - it all becomes random gibberish without a valid key. It could literally mean just keeping a couple of hundred bytes of RAM in an EEPROM and then destroying it on "factory reset".
For convenience of detection, however, you may want to zero the first few sectors of the storage so that filesystem probes see it as "no filesystem" rather than as random gibberish. But that's got zero impact on the data that WAS within it.
There's a reason that everything before 4.4 was third-party encryption and untrusted. There's a reason that proper, system-level full storage encryption (including SD card encryption) required changes to the OS. Since then, however, you just need to make sure nobody has your passphrase to stop them getting into your device. Then make sure that nobody has the passphrase-encrypted key blocks at the beginning of the disk (usually) and the data is nothing more than random gibberish.
About the only thing needing a complete wipe of all data is really if you're put into duress to provide a key (which would obviously then provide the data) or if a key is discovered and someone wishes to prove that you DID hold the key / data (by provably decrypting with that key to show that it must have been the right one and, maybe, therefore that you had knowledge of it).
Wipe the key-block, and the encrypted data is basically undecryptable. Same way TrueCrypt etc. work. And even though your passphrase may only be 10 characters, the key block might well be hundreds of bytes long and THAT's what actually has to be decrypted first in order to get the real key to decrypt the rest of the data.
Erm.... yes?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPjrRNlTmPU
A quick Google just now shows that just about any Samsung device from the Galaxy Fit to the Ace to the main phones has ALREADY had some distro retro-fitted to it. Android IS Linux, it's just that the interface isn't Gnome or KDE and the application format isn't ELF binary but Dalvik etc.
It's just an ARM device. As such, running a mainstream distro on a Galaxy device is probably orders of magnitude EASIER than pissing about trying to build a board that fits into an old case... and gives you the same result if you bother to tinker with it (or if there's a single project in the world that's already tinkered with it for you to customise to phone).
In the same way, I can emulate almost any Android phone with VirtualBox etc. setups on my PC - they are just standard ARM Linux devices at the end of the day.
The iPad? I'm completely anti-apple but there's no reason why not, but I imagine it would be much harder work.
But running a Linux distro on a Samsung phone?
1) You already are, it's just been pared back to the phone basics.
2) Yes, you can already do exactly that.
One Google it took and DOZENS of projects popped up that have done exactly that.
And, since then, almost every Internet service I use has started bringing their stuff out of the US. Not saying that makes us "hack-proof" (not least from our own intelligence agencies) but businesses can't do business with other governments or even large corporations if this kind of thing is suspected to be going on.
Every week or so, another large company tells me that they've pulled all their EU users and their data to their Ireland datacentre so that only the US people's data can be "collected" by the US authorities and otherwise the NSA are just the same as any other foreign hostile entity trying to get into their systems.
DropBox was the latest one I got an email from. The government and education services already do everything in-EU anyway because of a lovely thing called the Data Protection Act (which the US really needs to start adopting its own version of), and now even people's photo-sharing sites are doing the same because they just don't want this kind of stuff reflecting on them because they happen to do business in the US too.
Tell me, people, if China were doing this everybody would be up in arms. But because it's the US, it's okay?
All they've done is made everybody go from "Maybe the NSA could do this if they wanted" to "We have to assume they are doing this, all day, every day, no matter what the law says", move their data abroad, and massively increase awareness of security and encryption.
Hell, I'm now suspicious of Elliptic Curve, especially if it relies on published curve parameters rather than them being an inherently configurable part of the exchange (like Diffie-Helman - agree on a curve that nobody has used before but has certain properties and then use that as the basis for encryption) - I have a feeling that all the push to move on COULD be a cleverly orchestrated move to something such agencies "approve" of in secret even if they say it causes them problems in public.
When you think the trick is happening, maybe it's already been done...
0.5Gb internal storage. The Galaxy phone I point at can put a microSD in too - it's not quite the same as saying that it's got that as primary internal storage. And that Galaxy has 1Gb internal storage. My point is that YOU pay for the microSD. The device INCLUDE the internal storage in the price. And you get less with this device, for more cost.
And again, my point is cost. If you can get off-the-shelf components to do something similar for VASTLY reduced prices, then you have to wonder what you're paying for. If you can get a Samsung phone - with roughly the same makeup and components for 1/5th the price, and if you can build stuff with similar chips for similar purposes (even including LCD touchscreens, etc.) that use open-standards to communicate and no "hidden firmware" for a pittance - again, what are you PAYING for with this device?
This isn't how much things like this cost, clearly. Maybe the BOARD is more expensive, as it's custom. Maybe a PARTICULAR screen is more expensive as it's in limited supply. But the overall device? It's a bog-standard phone. Quite what "unfree" firmware does a commercial device like a Galaxy have once you've rooted the Android install on it? Pretty much the same as this device - the GSM chip will have a proprietary firmware to ensure radio compliance.
And if not, how much would it cost to replace, say, the GPS functionality on the Samsung with an "open" replacement? Again, nowhere NEAR the cost of this device (which is basically doing something similar by relying on the manufacturing for a previous device to provide the baseline).
In runs of one and tens, yes, maybe this price is reasonable. In runs of 100's and 1000's - no.. it's really not. Not in the age of ubiquitous fast low-power common-bus chips for all these functions.
This reminds me of the open-graphics-card initiatives. The time spent on starting from scratch (and inevitably relying on some closed piece of hardware at the end anyway) means that by the time it comes along few are interested, the costs are enormous, the parts are hard to obtain and the device quickly becomes obsolete (the project that springs to mind was still advertising PCI-only functionality just a year ago, not even PCIe). And it's based on FGPA's that you have to buy from a commercial vendor that doesn't publish their designs...
I'm a purchaser of niche products. I have a GP2X and some of its predecessors and successors, I programmed for it, it was built in tiny runs, cost more than equivalents, and was quickly obsoleted by commercial devices but it was "open" - it was ARM chips with a Linux install that you could code down to the bootloader.
5 times the cost of a (pretty expensive) commercial device that does the same and has the support of a major international company is a lot to ask for a niche product that doesn't do anything "special" (any Android machine, by definition, could run a plain Linux install if you so wanted to do that), is reliant on finding parts from old phones, and needs a tiny production run meaning you probably can never get the parts for it again if it goes wrong.
I'm not against the idea, here. I'm against the execution. There are cheaper phones that have bog-standard hardware that you can replace any firmware with open-firmware if you needed to (or even the entire functionality of that particular feature with another free equivalent) and put them in a case. In fact, here, the case is the CHEAP part. That's the part you could easily redesign to shove any board taken from a phone into. The electronics for a hobby project, however, is never going to get near the cost, reliability, even safety of a commercial product re-purposed.
The ideal isn't mine, particularly, but the execution seems incredibly poor is that's the closest you can get to price-point. Double-the-cost, maybe. FIVE TIMES is ludicrous.
Down-payment.
P.S. Your link clearly says "DOWN PAYMENT". That means not full payment for the device.
Much like any GSM development board, then.
So what's "free" about it besides an output pin to push the GSM chip into reset mode?
FAQ page. Store was dead in seconds of the Slashdot posting.
But... the main communications chip still has a closed source firmware. So, actually.. what's changed? Sure, you can turn the radio off but that kinda defeats the point of having a phone.
"According to current calculations, the cost of the motherboard should be somewhere around 990 EUR. The complete device will cost about 150 EUR more, depending on prices and availability of N900 spare parts."
Holy cow, freedom (at least partial freedom) comes at a seriously hefty price. That's five times the cost of a half-decent Samsung Galaxy (S4 or S4 Mini, not network-locked), where I'm from.
And for 1GHz, 1Gb RAM, 0.5Gb storage. That's not even close to the spec of the above Samsung.
Pay five times the cost, get less back, and the possibility of component shortage making repair/replacement impossible.
How do this stack up against the $9 CHIP project, etc. with its processor? I can build a GSM "phone" with Wifi, SD, touchscreen etc. from Arduino shields for way, way, way less than this costs on top of that.
I mean, for God's sake, they've bothered to put IrDA and FM radio on it!
Niche doesn't even begin to cover it. When you're more expensive than Apple, and can't do anywhere near as much, you know that you're onto a loser.
I have any number of old disks but just sitting and ISO'ing them would take forever. Shipping costs would also be prohibitive.
However, I would be interested in finding a few old DOS utils that I used to have, and several of those old "we send you a floppy catalogue, you create an order, send the floppy back and we send you the shareware you ordered" services that had the weirdest of things that you couldn't get hold of anywhere else.
Interactive touchscreens now, and short-throw projectors directly above the board.
And it's a standard part of a UK teacher job interview to do a lesson on an interactive whiteboard. You can't escape it and teacher-training prepares you for it.
It's quite literally an all-day-every-day tool in every school I've ever worked in.
I still have a complete set of INPUT magazine. Some of the biggest programs in it are exactly that, with explanations of the decoding.
Hell, I even chatted to one guy on here who had written one of the biggest of those programs when he was just a kid.
Those were the days.
Show me how that works for Windows login without the exact software mentioned above?
LDAP. Yes. AD login from Windows login screen? No.
I work in schools, I'd love to move to key authentication to save all the "kids forgetting their password / stealing their friends password" hassle (physical items are more difficult to lose or "steal" without getting into more trouble!) but the costs are still FUCKING ludicrous for any such solution and two-thirds of that cost is just software and nothing to do with the devices at all. Still struggling to justify this:
The software to put this into AD logins (which is what most businesses use to tie all their stuff together and do the simplest of logins) is $48/user. Plus $25/user for the key. That's nearly $30k just to get a small school logged on with the system. By the time you buy spares, train users, tie it into your systems, etc. you're looking at a $50k project at least. That's the IT budget gone. Just to replace a password with the simplest of login dongles.
And when 2/3rds of that is software (not hardware) which you just have to hope is available for the next version of your OS (GINA logins went the way of the dodo already), works on the servers when you have an emergency and need to login, hope it works for things like kids logging into school websites from home (or even remote desktop, etc.)... it's stupendously expensive for such a simple thing.
I can't justify paying that much for the one-off cost of writing the software to login.
These ideas are great - would love to deploy them and will gladly pay a lot of money for them. But having the device isn't even 1% of the problem. The software, the ongoing compatibility, etc. consume most of the costs and there's no guarantee at all as the system expands.
I'd much rather pay for the keys and then pay even a few thousand a year for some licensed software to sort out the in-between parts. But everything is either needing a smartcard reader on every PC (useless in tablet environments and remote logins from home) or - more likely - stupendously expensive software.
Anyone know of a sensibly priced solution?
Cygwin works well until you get other programs that use it. You either have to install them within your Cygwin install folder (and hope they are able to cope with Cygwin updates you make, e.g. to Cygwin 2) or suffer DLL hell. Look at the Cygwin FAQ for ".DLL" - if you're not familiar with those errors already, you haven't used Cygwin very much. Now consider across a bunch of workstations on a network.
"Want say tunneling to a Windows service? If you use Windows only as a client...."
Don't. Use a proper tool. PuTTY is a client, not a server. This is like saying that ssh-client is no good at being sshd,.. of course not. But that's not what we're talking about.
And the fact is that for every SSH server set up (properly), you probably have 10-100 clients joining to it or you wouldn't bother setting it up. And one of the main points of things like SSH servers is cross-compile farms and remote access. And almost all the universities that offer such services recommend PuTTY if you're on Windows (because they've dealt with the Cygwin issues, I assure you, and decided it's not worth the hassle).
Opinion, of course. So's yours. Just because it's contrary doesn't make it more or less valid.
However, PuTTY is widely used and recommended for everything from talking to your Arduino's over a serial port to logging into your University server... go take a look. Cygwin - if and when it comes up - is not mentioned in nearly as many places for such simple actions.
Cygwin is, in fact, overkill for the majority of users who just want to use SSH, telnet or serial services from Windows. If they wanted Linux, generally they end up installing it in preference to Cygwin.
Most schools in London (and throughout the UK) already have interactive whiteboards in every classroom.
So, to be fair, it's no more difficult to doodle on them than an ordinary whiteboard. But you can't go to Google and doodle over the diagram on a pen-only board.
And the most popular brand, SmartBoard, have Linux drivers and software. Nobody ever uses that, because schools get Microsoft (and, no, they don't have humongous discounts or kickbacks - MS licensing is one of my biggest budget items every year).
So if you're already on Microsoft and already on whiteboards, it's dumb to suggest going back to pencil and paper for the majority of your teaching / learning.
Personally, I don't get why we bother to spend years teaching kids to write with a pen when they still struggle with maths and science into their teen years. Teach them block capitals, move on.
(Please note, my comments may not reflect the opinion of any of my employers, past or present - but to be honest, the way things are moving, it's that huge a leap to suggest it. This September, we're starting to roll out individual iPads to the kids.)
That's just because they compiled without specifying the build number.
That's LITERALLY a ten-second fix and recompile to resolve.
Don't identify software / spam / viruses by "it has X feature that's easily copied", whether that's a registry entry, a process name or an arbitrary string.
Publish the damn checksums at a minimum, or GPG signing key ideallly.
CygWin is a damn nightmare, especially if you have other software that uses it.
It suffers from enormous "DLL Hell" problems when it has multiple versions trying to load and if you use programs that use older versions of Cygwin, they don't necessarily run at all in co-existence with programs using newer versions. "Cygwin1.dll" exists is so many different versions that it's almost impossible to manage properly.
I used to develop on Windows with Eclipse and Cygwin. I quickly moved to MinGW because silly things like random games, utilities, etc. that use it would interfere with the version I was developing against.
If all you want is a real terminal on a GUI, Cygwin is total overkill. Not only that, if you use WinSCP as well, it will manage the keys for you properly between both programs so you don't even notice that you're using it.
Use *nix, or use Windows and PuTTY. For sure, as a network admin, I wouldn't let put Cygwin near your computers but I'll happily pre-install PuTTY for you (zero install needed, certainly no pissing about with PATH and multiple versions of the DLL etc.).
Any sort of COM port access.
Any sort of SSH access.
Any sort of SSH tunnelling access.
I work in IT, PuTTY is one of the first things I install in every workplace - not "just because" but I'll be damned if I'm going to SSH into a remote server's management module without it or try to use some junky HTTP/Java monstrosity to achieve what one command can achieve on the CLI.
Hell, I've diagnosed mail servers using it by telnetting to the mail port and issuing commands direct for a setting that some Exchange "experts" denied would ever affect anything - when you can show them the entire mail transaction live rather than some convoluted log that purports to tell you everything that happens on the email sending with a junky bounce error, it kinda hurts.
Sure, a lot of stuff is HTTP-managed nowadays but wait until Chrome removes Java and see if the other browsers follow suit. Because then you'll be back on the CLI quite quickly.
The last Cisco switch I installed came only with some absolutely worthless piece of software that only works if you have version X of IE etc. But SSH was a one-tick enable and I could do everything else from there.