The population distribution in most of the US is simply not geared toward passenger rail except possibly at the local level
That's not really true. It rarely makes sense to extend light-rail systems beyond the densely packed urban centers, but you're ignoring the old heavy traffic. The layout of our towns, highways, etc are all heavily determined by the paths that the railroads took 150-75 years ago. This hasn't changed, as many of our Interstates were built along similar pathways.
Now, Amtrak may suck, but it's not like there's good competition available. Driving takes every bit as long and already costs far more, and our piss-poor airlines with worse food than a Flying J: Don't even get me started on the Fly America Act and even greater sins our government commits in their favor.
If we had new rail-systems and new stations (with ZipCar and other car rental companies etc. colocated thereupon), they might very well be able to perform profitably. Let foreigners run 'em, too, so that the food doesn't taste worse than the truck stop food you'd get when driving (which is still better than the nothing-to-ramen spectrum on American air carriers), and this may very well be worthwhile. If speedy rail systems can be built that are fast enough and substantially more environmentally sound, we might even consider taxing competing air routes to subsidize them in an effort to meet soon-to-be-adopted CO2 emissions goals. Of course you may wish to hold off until after opening them up to all comers to knock the price down an equivalent amount.
Regardless, I'd assert that there is a market for a competently run Amtrak with maglevs et al or, better yet, multiple competing private firms. We just don't see it right now because the Amtrak service is (marginally) worse than the (insanely bad) domestic airlines. If we can restore service to all the cities over the million-person mark, I think they'd do just fine.
They just can't compete as long as:
1: They're as slow as a car 2: They serve worse food than truck stops (like the airlines) 3: They fail to advertise and compete aggressively due to lack of real market pressure 4: They fail to service many large cities
Still, that's half the point of the above. Look beyond light rail - The car manufacturers can make a lot of money regearing to deal with the above issues. If they're going to be bailed out with taxpayer money anyway, perhaps we should lead them in this cheaper and more fuel-efficient direction.
So then brute force attacks would be preceded by an open port check?
Unless you use some kind of port knocking attempt, that wouldn't solve much of anything for long.
Two points: 1: Port knocking or single-packet authentication really paired with the aforementioned port change really is a remarkably effective solution.
2: The article is discussing attempts to break into a large mass of computers, not targeted attacks on a single box. To add the considerable increase in overhead and visibility inherent in running port scans over a public network would be quite expensive, both in terms of the decrease in the number of boxes you can hit per minute and the risk of nodes in the botnet being cleaned up and removed sooner than they might otherwise have been. The former is doubly troubling to a botnet owner when you consider the cost of trying to identify the protocol in use on all the open ports other than 22, or of wasting an attempt to open a TCP connection on each of the ports.
Another point: If this was shipped via FedEx or DHL to post, instead of via APO, they'd have some recourse in the form of shipping insurance. If it just disappears in an APO, they don't - The gubmint probably doesn't assume any responsibility for things they lose in APO/FPO/DPO/pouch/whatever.
The way I'm reading the above is that it basically works like a no-compete. While it may be somewhat unfortunate from your perspective, I'd say it makes perfect sense for the vendor to disallow (or at least discourage) their "partners" from working with someone that may be trying to fork the project and openly compete with the vendor.
I mean, that is what we're talking about here. The submitter wants to hold onto redistribution rights, the original vendor doesn't want to give both that AND licensed support, lest they end up training the third party support contractors that knock them out of the market.
Yes, it's fair and legitimate. I'd personally push against it if the policy were being discussed at a firm that I was working for, but I wouldn't be able to use terms like "unfair" and "illegitimate" in the process.
That said, surely you can find someone other than their "partners" to do the same job.
Quite - It seems much more odd now, considering that the project could (presumably) have self-funded contractor mods and, compared to a Second Life knock-off, cost Google next to nothing to maintain.
"When an enterprise deploys office software they want at least some kind of support from the vendor."
But... this is a package of free as in beer home-use applications never intended, at least in its most common form, for corporate use. The real answer is that the added clip-art and other miscellaneous minor differences between StarOffice and its OpenOffice base are well worth including if you're getting them for free. If not, it makes more sense to stick with OpenOffice. This is more likely to be an interim move pending a big global "downgrade" to OpenOffice when they start pushing out v3 - One hopes that, by that point, the differences between StarOffice and the more current OpenOffice build become insignificant.
Nowhere near as educational, but you bring up another good point. The work of Cory Doctorow would introduce a number of technical concepts, and without requiring the reader to grok quite as much on the first pass as the Cryptonomicon - and would do it on the cheap. If you've got the capability to print his CC-licensed novels for gratis distribution to the prisoners it might very well be cheaper than some of the above.
So the excuse to not boycot sprint is that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing?
If the hands are separated enough that they don't communicate about something like this, Sprint Wireless would still be in the wrong for failing to source out to an ISP that's capable of passing normal traffic, just like if they were separate companies. There's no excuse for this childish, petty nonsense.
Re:blah the emporer has his new clothes on again.
on
The Walking House
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
>...that's why I have wheels instead of legs.
Instead of? Hate to break it to you, but if you're posting from the US the odds are over 9 to 1 that your household has at least one set of wheels. I believe the grandparent poster's point was that the legs on this new mobile home can't possibly move fast enough to provide effective means of evacuation (as described in the summary) or to negotiate its way through traffic. Barring your ability to go off-road in a settled environment without crushing everything in your path, your legs are prone to the same drawbacks.
I withdraw my previous comment. I initially mistakenly believed that this much-touted $999 Macbook contained a real GPU, but instead have found that it still uses Intel's Extreme-ly bad graphics. Nvidia Macbooks start at $1299 - $400 or 44.444% more expensive than its nearest competition. The Mac-tax persists.
>If 85% of white people voted for McCain, it would be considered racist.
And it would shock the authors of this study, as presumably far less than 85% of the population consists of Raisinettes. Me, I'm writing in Cthulhu, per the orders of a certain T-shirt I saw once.
caitsith01:You will also get some brands of Windows laptop much cheaper by shopping around. In fact, Dell is one of the only companies who don't fall into this category.
Not to mention that the review picks Lenovo and Sony, two of the most expensive brands. Where is Asus, for instance?
Honestly, I spent about two months looking for something with comparable specs earlier this summer, and nothing could be had for under $900, and the Lenovo I found that was pretty close to this was $1200. Dell's still starting their lines with ATi and Nvidia video cards at $899 and selling suckers more expensive "XPS" laptops, pitching them for gaming and "entertainment" use with Intel GPUs, much like Apple did up until a week or two ago.
$999 is a fair price for something with a real video card - The whole point of this article is that, by including a real video card for once, the $999 price point becomes fair. Before that, the MacBooks were $200-300 more than like-spec'ed Windows laptops. When we get down to a hundred dollars or less, that is no longer anywhere near significant enough to have their competition be considered "much cheaper."
Good luck finding even a previous generation Penryn proc and Nvidia card for less than $900. I still can't. That Newegg link shows every Penryn and Wolfdale-powered laptop they sell with ATi and Nvidia GPUs. Not a one can be had for less than $949 ($200 cheaper than the cheapest ASUS), and the one that can is a Lenovo - Hardly one "of the most expensive brands." If you dropped the new Macbook into Newegg's search results it would be the third cheapest new laptop in its class.
AC wrote:And then along comes some group that disagrees with the project leaders and they fork it. Since the government 0.6.1.1 code is open, they start their own 'republic of Tivo', which makes consumers of government very happy and makes 'the father of open source government' unhappy.
Soon, there are so many government distributions, each with their own election managers and schedulers (some completely fair, some not) that nobody knows which government is best for them. They only know it sometimes won't sell wireless and sometimes the open source penal code is not 100% compatible with new versions of the city manager and some people keep getting called 'blobs'.
Sounds like hellheaven ala Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash or Ken Macleod's Star Fraction. There are plenty of nutty little microstate endorsers that would love to see something similar to this occur. Me, I'll be happy when they let me eat cake. Preferably with Oreo-based crust. Mmmmm.... crust.
Actually, it looks like the last prerelease beta's big "feature" was that it stripped away an already extant installation routine.
There's a reason I don't bother with source-based Linux distributions anymore, and I've never seen one that made installation anywhere near the level of sheer PITA that you see in OpenBSD. User friendly LiveCDs like this are built to pitch an OS as a desktop OS, not a server OS. To strip away a user-friendly installation routine and call it a "feature" seems like a joke to me.
It's intentionally thumbing your nose like this to users that drives them away. I'm at an absolute loss as to why this is supposed to be a decent alternative to a modern BSD and Linux based LiveCD with fully functional installation routines, limiting your level of hassle to one download or purchase. Again, PITA/not going to bother, although I would in a heartbeat if properly packaged ala an Ubuntu LiveCD.
It's too bad these positions will, most definitely, be filled by military personnel
Actually, I'd be shocked if they were. This seems like a natural field in which to have a very high percentage of contractors and DoD civilian employees. Given current trends, I'm sure that the contractors will find a way to wriggle in to this new money source. It wouldn't be impossible for you to hunt these jobs down.
If the Rolex is designed in a manner that makes it far more likely to fail than the Casio, yes. Of course it does. Silly question, really. The only reason I labeled the MacBook Air a "joke" was its single USB port and lack of any other wired peripheral support. Otherwise I'd have labeled it an overpriced device that I wasn't even remotely interested in, like a Rolex. See the difference?
Any chance that this could spur something on Apple's end? The Air is a joke of a machine, with its sole (count 'em - one) expansion port, just begging for failure. It'd sure be nice to have something more Mac Mini & Eee inspired, or the holy of holies - A Fujitsu Lifebook P8240 or Gigabyte M912-inspired Mac.
On a related note, do you generally incentivize the review board with cash bonuses for patents cleanly shot down, or do they end up mixed in with the same pool of people that are making the submissions (as they themselves presumably require some level of subject-matter expertise) and signing off on nearly everything that crosses their desks? Curious how this process actually works out.
Everything this does I can already do with my Sansa Clip (which has easier to manage audiobook and podcast support out of the box, assuming your's ships with current firmware) and with my N800. That said, I considered purchasing an MP3 player to run this on before picking up the Clip and was disappointed by the hardware available. Nearly all of the hardware this runs on is no longer available new in stores and no manufacturers have picked up and run with the software on standardized hardware, from what I've been able to gather. This project will be a lot more interesting when you can buy it, stock. As it is, it only really affects people dedicated enough to hunt down used hardware or people far enough out of the OSS community that they bought DRM-laden iPods in the first place. Maybe this is something Neuros could do to bring back their portable line?
Identity theft can, in the worst case scenarios, have costs that are comparable to the initial outlay in childbirth and treatment for the diseases mentioned in the parent post (given insurance).
Slashdot Mirror
Quite - Of all the news sites not to make the distinction....
The population distribution in most of the US is simply not geared toward passenger rail except possibly at the local level
That's not really true. It rarely makes sense to extend light-rail systems beyond the densely packed urban centers, but you're ignoring the old heavy traffic. The layout of our towns, highways, etc are all heavily determined by the paths that the railroads took 150-75 years ago. This hasn't changed, as many of our Interstates were built along similar pathways.
Now, Amtrak may suck, but it's not like there's good competition available. Driving takes every bit as long and already costs far more, and our piss-poor airlines with worse food than a Flying J: Don't even get me started on the Fly America Act and even greater sins our government commits in their favor.
If we had new rail-systems and new stations (with ZipCar and other car rental companies etc. colocated thereupon), they might very well be able to perform profitably. Let foreigners run 'em, too, so that the food doesn't taste worse than the truck stop food you'd get when driving (which is still better than the nothing-to-ramen spectrum on American air carriers), and this may very well be worthwhile. If speedy rail systems can be built that are fast enough and substantially more environmentally sound, we might even consider taxing competing air routes to subsidize them in an effort to meet soon-to-be-adopted CO2 emissions goals. Of course you may wish to hold off until after opening them up to all comers to knock the price down an equivalent amount.
Regardless, I'd assert that there is a market for a competently run Amtrak with maglevs et al or, better yet, multiple competing private firms. We just don't see it right now because the Amtrak service is (marginally) worse than the (insanely bad) domestic airlines. If we can restore service to all the cities over the million-person mark, I think they'd do just fine.
They just can't compete as long as:
1: They're as slow as a car
2: They serve worse food than truck stops (like the airlines)
3: They fail to advertise and compete aggressively due to lack of real market pressure
4: They fail to service many large cities
Still, that's half the point of the above. Look beyond light rail - The car manufacturers can make a lot of money regearing to deal with the above issues. If they're going to be bailed out with taxpayer money anyway, perhaps we should lead them in this cheaper and more fuel-efficient direction.
So then brute force attacks would be preceded by an open port check?
Unless you use some kind of port knocking attempt, that wouldn't solve much of anything for long.
Two points:
1: Port knocking or single-packet authentication really paired with the aforementioned port change really is a remarkably effective solution.
2: The article is discussing attempts to break into a large mass of computers, not targeted attacks on a single box. To add the considerable increase in overhead and visibility inherent in running port scans over a public network would be quite expensive, both in terms of the decrease in the number of boxes you can hit per minute and the risk of nodes in the botnet being cleaned up and removed sooner than they might otherwise have been. The former is doubly troubling to a botnet owner when you consider the cost of trying to identify the protocol in use on all the open ports other than 22, or of wasting an attempt to open a TCP connection on each of the ports.
Another point:
If this was shipped via FedEx or DHL to post, instead of via APO, they'd have some recourse in the form of shipping insurance. If it just disappears in an APO, they don't - The gubmint probably doesn't assume any responsibility for things they lose in APO/FPO/DPO/pouch/whatever.
As much as it sucks, you may be SOL.
The way I'm reading the above is that it basically works like a no-compete. While it may be somewhat unfortunate from your perspective, I'd say it makes perfect sense for the vendor to disallow (or at least discourage) their "partners" from working with someone that may be trying to fork the project and openly compete with the vendor.
I mean, that is what we're talking about here. The submitter wants to hold onto redistribution rights, the original vendor doesn't want to give both that AND licensed support, lest they end up training the third party support contractors that knock them out of the market.
Yes, it's fair and legitimate. I'd personally push against it if the policy were being discussed at a firm that I was working for, but I wouldn't be able to use terms like "unfair" and "illegitimate" in the process.
That said, surely you can find someone other than their "partners" to do the same job.
Quite - It seems much more odd now, considering that the project could (presumably) have self-funded contractor mods and, compared to a Second Life knock-off, cost Google next to nothing to maintain.
More importantly, Wal-Mart already carries compatible blocks. This is a non-issue in the US market - The toys already exist.
"When an enterprise deploys office software they want at least some kind of support from the vendor."
But... this is a package of free as in beer home-use applications never intended, at least in its most common form, for corporate use. The real answer is that the added clip-art and other miscellaneous minor differences between StarOffice and its OpenOffice base are well worth including if you're getting them for free. If not, it makes more sense to stick with OpenOffice. This is more likely to be an interim move pending a big global "downgrade" to OpenOffice when they start pushing out v3 - One hopes that, by that point, the differences between StarOffice and the more current OpenOffice build become insignificant.
Nowhere near as educational, but you bring up another good point. The work of Cory Doctorow would introduce a number of technical concepts, and without requiring the reader to grok quite as much on the first pass as the Cryptonomicon - and would do it on the cheap. If you've got the capability to print his CC-licensed novels for gratis distribution to the prisoners it might very well be cheaper than some of the above.
So the excuse to not boycot sprint is that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing?
If the hands are separated enough that they don't communicate about something like this, Sprint Wireless would still be in the wrong for failing to source out to an ISP that's capable of passing normal traffic, just like if they were separate companies. There's no excuse for this childish, petty nonsense.
>...that's why I have wheels instead of legs.
Instead of? Hate to break it to you, but if you're posting from the US the odds are over 9 to 1 that your household has at least one set of wheels. I believe the grandparent poster's point was that the legs on this new mobile home can't possibly move fast enough to provide effective means of evacuation (as described in the summary) or to negotiate its way through traffic. Barring your ability to go off-road in a settled environment without crushing everything in your path, your legs are prone to the same drawbacks.
I withdraw my previous comment. I initially mistakenly believed that this much-touted $999 Macbook contained a real GPU, but instead have found that it still uses Intel's Extreme-ly bad graphics. Nvidia Macbooks start at $1299 - $400 or 44.444% more expensive than its nearest competition. The Mac-tax persists.
>If 85% of white people voted for McCain, it would be considered racist.
And it would shock the authors of this study, as presumably far less than 85% of the population consists of Raisinettes. Me, I'm writing in Cthulhu, per the orders of a certain T-shirt I saw once.
Policy statements and guidelines are not subject to the rules you mention and are subject to IAL. Kiss it.
caitsith01:You will also get some brands of Windows laptop much cheaper by shopping around. In fact, Dell is one of the only companies who don't fall into this category.
Not to mention that the review picks Lenovo and Sony, two of the most expensive brands. Where is Asus, for instance?
Honestly, I spent about two months looking for something with comparable specs earlier this summer, and nothing could be had for under $900, and the Lenovo I found that was pretty close to this was $1200. Dell's still starting their lines with ATi and Nvidia video cards at $899 and selling suckers more expensive "XPS" laptops, pitching them for gaming and "entertainment" use with Intel GPUs, much like Apple did up until a week or two ago.
$999 is a fair price for something with a real video card - The whole point of this article is that, by including a real video card for once, the $999 price point becomes fair. Before that, the MacBooks were $200-300 more than like-spec'ed Windows laptops. When we get down to a hundred dollars or less, that is no longer anywhere near significant enough to have their competition be considered "much cheaper."
Good luck finding even a previous generation Penryn proc and Nvidia card for less than $900. I still can't. That Newegg link shows every Penryn and Wolfdale-powered laptop they sell with ATi and Nvidia GPUs. Not a one can be had for less than $949 ($200 cheaper than the cheapest ASUS), and the one that can is a Lenovo - Hardly one "of the most expensive brands." If you dropped the new Macbook into Newegg's search results it would be the third cheapest new laptop in its class.
AC wrote: And then along comes some group that disagrees with the project leaders and they fork it. Since the government 0.6.1.1 code is open, they start their own 'republic of Tivo', which makes consumers of government very happy and makes 'the father of open source government' unhappy.
Soon, there are so many government distributions, each with their own election managers and schedulers (some completely fair, some not) that nobody knows which government is best for them. They only know it sometimes won't sell wireless and sometimes the open source penal code is not 100% compatible with new versions of the city manager and some people keep getting called 'blobs'.
Sounds like hellheaven ala Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash or Ken Macleod's Star Fraction. There are plenty of nutty little microstate endorsers that would love to see something similar to this occur. Me, I'll be happy when they let me eat cake. Preferably with Oreo-based crust. Mmmmm.... crust.
Actually, it looks like the last prerelease beta's big "feature" was that it stripped away an already extant installation routine.
There's a reason I don't bother with source-based Linux distributions anymore, and I've never seen one that made installation anywhere near the level of sheer PITA that you see in OpenBSD. User friendly LiveCDs like this are built to pitch an OS as a desktop OS, not a server OS. To strip away a user-friendly installation routine and call it a "feature" seems like a joke to me.
It's intentionally thumbing your nose like this to users that drives them away. I'm at an absolute loss as to why this is supposed to be a decent alternative to a modern BSD and Linux based LiveCD with fully functional installation routines, limiting your level of hassle to one download or purchase. Again, PITA/not going to bother, although I would in a heartbeat if properly packaged ala an Ubuntu LiveCD.
Oh how I wish I had modpoints. Ahem: The parent?
It's too bad these positions will, most definitely, be filled by military personnel
Actually, I'd be shocked if they were. This seems like a natural field in which to have a very high percentage of contractors and DoD civilian employees. Given current trends, I'm sure that the contractors will find a way to wriggle in to this new money source. It wouldn't be impossible for you to hunt these jobs down.
Try the TYPE command, ala "TYPE C:\proc\sys\net\ipv4\tcp_syncookies|grep evil"
If the Rolex is designed in a manner that makes it far more likely to fail than the Casio, yes. Of course it does. Silly question, really. The only reason I labeled the MacBook Air a "joke" was its single USB port and lack of any other wired peripheral support. Otherwise I'd have labeled it an overpriced device that I wasn't even remotely interested in, like a Rolex. See the difference?
Any chance that this could spur something on Apple's end? The Air is a joke of a machine, with its sole (count 'em - one) expansion port, just begging for failure. It'd sure be nice to have something more Mac Mini & Eee inspired, or the holy of holies - A Fujitsu Lifebook P8240 or Gigabyte M912-inspired Mac.
On a related note, any sign of new Mac Minis?
On a related note, do you generally incentivize the review board with cash bonuses for patents cleanly shot down, or do they end up mixed in with the same pool of people that are making the submissions (as they themselves presumably require some level of subject-matter expertise) and signing off on nearly everything that crosses their desks? Curious how this process actually works out.
Everything this does I can already do with my Sansa Clip (which has easier to manage audiobook and podcast support out of the box, assuming your's ships with current firmware) and with my N800. That said, I considered purchasing an MP3 player to run this on before picking up the Clip and was disappointed by the hardware available. Nearly all of the hardware this runs on is no longer available new in stores and no manufacturers have picked up and run with the software on standardized hardware, from what I've been able to gather. This project will be a lot more interesting when you can buy it, stock. As it is, it only really affects people dedicated enough to hunt down used hardware or people far enough out of the OSS community that they bought DRM-laden iPods in the first place. Maybe this is something Neuros could do to bring back their portable line?
Identity theft can, in the worst case scenarios, have costs that are comparable to the initial outlay in childbirth and treatment for the diseases mentioned in the parent post (given insurance).