I think all numbers should get 5 extra digits. Let the PBX or mobile phone decided which of the 100,000 extra numbers to answer and let the rest go to a voice mail system. That would make my phone useful as a voice device again and end the scams.
Oracle is in court claiming Amazon is selling a commodity to the US DOD and therefor shouldn't have an exclusive deal for a long time. The US courts have agreed with that argument in the past. If the courts rule that a specific cloud service is just like any other, then the door is open for all the competition and the big 3 don't have the best price. The 2nd tier cloud providers are much cheaper than the big three and seem to have better tech support.
I've been renting space for my own hardware in data centers for more than 2 decades and late last year I moved almost all of it all to virtual servers. For about a quarter of the money I have much faster servers in the parts of the world where I want them. I could also have 5 global load balancers using anycast and two processing servers for less than $100/mo.
If I give you my number and extension 48524, then my phone won't accept any call to that number except for your number with the proper extension and I know you leaked it because of your bad choice in social media.
The international standards allow US phone number to have 5 more digits so turn them into extensions. That would give everyone 100,000 extensions that their phone or carrier could manage. Turn it on and default all 10 digit numbers to the original ten plus 00000. Work can have the ten plus 99999. Friends get their own number which matches the last 5 of the number they use to call you. Everything else gets rejected.
Old versions of real Unix had printed manual pages. You could start at the beginning and read the whole thing. It was a great way to understand the full scope of a system. Also reading all the entries in a fixed order means your not missing anything.
Long before they were gobbled up by Oracle, Sun used to offer universities cheap sun workstations. They had a trade in program where you could get half off on your upgraded computer by turning in any old sun server. They never asked for the computer back but the same department couldn't use the machine for two upgrades which encouraged it to be recycled into a different department who could then upgrade it to something else. University discount was typically 50% and sometimes 65% and the trade in dropped the cost by an additional half so some departments were buying new hardware at 17% of what a small company would pay. A $10k Sun server at $1,700 was a much more powerful than a pc of the day. When those admins hit the corporate world in the dot.com bubble, they knew Sun hardware and they bought massive amounts of it.
MasterCard and Visa want to get in this business. All the systems they have been building over the last few years have had the capacity to include extensive order details in the records sent to them.
My email address has a + and ! in it. Most systems won't take those characters. The shortest email address I've ever seen used was 5 characters long as it was two letters @ a CC TLD.
Lasers are controlled in the US by 21 CFR 1040 and have been for a very long time. There is a odd loop hole in that if you if have your laser hit a lens that spreads out the beam so that at the end of the laser is larger than an eyeball, it can deliver far more power even if the beam is much smaller far away. Some early traffic speed lasers took advantage of that. The ANSI standard has the same problem. They should require the test at the end of the laser and 100 meters away.
Gamers seem to be moving back to PS2 mice and keyboards so many of the newer motherboards have PS2 ports on them. The two I bought this month had both a keyboard and mouse port. Inside they even had the headers for RS-232 and parallel ports.
I don't know why the parallel ports are heading back. Parallel ports are easy to use much like the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi except they are 5v not 3.3. I'm guessing the makers are looking at the replacement business and much of the stuff that wasn't updated on the Win98 -> Win 7 cycle was because of lack serial and parallel ports to talk to old equipment. Most of the old restaurant use serial ports and the bell signal to open the cash drawer.
People are scanning IPv6 the same way they used to brute force SNMP MIBs.
There are two different issues. First is finding networks and the second is finding hosts on a network.
You start by mapping the routable/32. You can take short cuts if you have access to a global routing table. That drops the number of networks from about 4 billion to less than 2,000 with no scanning at all. Inside each/32 is a/48 to/56. Once again a global routing table will reduce the search space. The right kind of ping can tell you if a major ISP is doing anything with each/56 for a probe. Repeat for each active/56 to find out active/64. Now you have a mostly complete list of active and correctly functional IPv6 networks in the world.
Finding machines on the network is the hard part because they should be hiding behind a 2^64 random number. If they are servers they might have a vanity number like...::dead:beef or more likely...::1. Sysadmins will tend to give useful number to external hosts or even workstations. Assuming..:site:floor:cube will find hosts in large companies. They might use a MAC based address which reduces the search space to known workstation vendors. If someone hits my website with a Dell MAC based IPv6 address, I can assume they have other Dells of about the same age on their network so nearby MAC address might hit a host.
People say IPv6 doesn't do NAT. If you use random/64 addresses, that isn't any different than using random port numbers to hide the way NAT does. The only major difference is if a session has already been established but most cheap NAT routers don't care. If your NAT router can be reset without ending long running sessions (like ssh without keepalives on), your current NAT setup is less secure than using fast rotating IPv6 addresses. There is more entropy in a random 64 bit IPv6 than 16 port NAT source port+sequence number and most only use the source port.
20 years ago a local radio station ran a contest to find local new music. The rules were something along the lines that the band had to have made the album in the last year that had at least 6 songs, they could nominate one of the songs for the contest and they had to live in the listening area. They had about 3,000 albums submitted from a population area of about 3 million. I take that to mean that there is about one album made per year for each 1,000 people. That could mean as many as about 7.2 million new albums a year. and I expect most of them wouldn't be very good.
The recording industry associations are not about selling the new work of artists, they seem to want to restrict access to it so they can keep selling their older catalog stuff.
Most Unix like systems are happy without a "root" user as long as there is a user 0 called something.
I still don't agree with the POSIX standard that allows root to write to mode 000 files. If its 000, it was done for a reason and that means even root shouldn't be able to screw with it particularly if it is root:root mode 000.
Sand based atolls are effectively floating on slightly more sense layers and most of them are in areas where that other layer is flat. The atolls dissolve on one side and get built up on the other by a mix of consistent ocean currents and prevailing winds. That causes the islands to creep along keeping their basic shape until they hit depression or hill on the lower layer. Depressions tends to destroy the atoll and the hills tend to split the atolls in two.
These sinking islands are going to sink weather global warming is true or false but global warming always gets drug into conversation about them which sidelines the discussion.
If the machine is somewhat dead, you can't boot from something else to erase the internal flash and you can't put it in what used to be called target mode.
Even with external storage, if a secret file got moved to swap and the machine dies, that secret is on the flash chips. Encrypted or not, the government mandated procedure says it doesn't leave my security zone until destroyed. These types of government regulations exist in the USA, Canada, Australia, EU, Japan, Russia and China.
I don't care if I can't move the flash to another machine and have it usable without reformatting but it must be removable. In the world of transparent encryption, I should be able to format it with a key of my choice and move it to some other device and enter that key or else it looks like another Clipper chip sleight of hand.
Their non-removable storage is a deal killer. I won't be buying them. I also won't be supporting individual users on two platforms so now all new machines will have to be windows (they insist on native office so no linux), and that means no more approvals for mac lap tops either. I expect that will have a carry on effect future iPhone sales as well.
Disposing of a repairable device goes against the green and e-waste policies too. How am I going to dispose of these since I can shred these things? I don't care if the case is 100 recycled aluminum (as if the old ones where close to that) if the whole thing is as disposable as a beer can.
Non-removable storage is a deal killer. I don't know what gets stored on local computers so it MUST to be wiped before it goes off site for repair.
This means I'm not going to be buying any of these. We have been waiting for years to replace some of the older minis and now I have to figure out what I'm going to do for a replacement. For now banning new Apple stuff from the company will be the policy.
Don't you have to comply with any sort of security polices at Apple?
Finding documentation is part of a clutter problem. Many people can find things in moderate levels of clutter up to a point and then it becomes nearly impossible to find most things. Modern documentation tends to follow the wiki model and that invites clutter unless you also have a librarian to organize that data like wikipedia does. A search engine isn't a substitute for proper organization.
There is also something called "decision fatigue" which is related to "executive function" which limit how many goal seeking decisions you can correctly make in a day. Extra decisions before work can result in fewer correct decisions at work. Example include Obama not choosing his breakfast or suit and Steve Jobs always wearing the same black turtle-neck. By habit they were rationing the decisions they made in a day.
There needs to be a system so that you can buy whatever from a very obnoxious caller and then once the money goes thorough, process the entire chain of transactions under electronic wire fraud.
Companies should be required to correctly answer the question "where did you get my number from" and "tell them and everyone else they are affiliated with to remove my details" and there should be major fines for not complying.
I would be happy for just more digits on the phone number. If 212-555-1234 goes to me, I want 212-555-1234-98765 to go to my phone and all the rest to go to disappear into a "its lenny" type system.
The contracts that towns signed for exclusive cable TV rights included many things that the cable companies aren't doing. There are requirements for educational channels and rules about kids programming. Many towns had deals about rate increases and rollout rates. Many towns could dig out their old contract, figure out how to nullify it and allow a second provider or even take over control of the local assets using eminent domain. Or they could be like a cable company and just change their mind.
If they are worried about e-waste they could give new life to older machines. They could offer 32->64 firmware updates for a bunch of old macs. The hackintosh community already figured out the hard part.
As people age they stop remembering details of scams but seem to remember they are smarter than the scammers so they can't be scammed. The result is they get taken. People who worked in security along with retired police and criminal lawyers are easier to scam after they retire than the average person.
Who would have thought he wasn't the overly emotional touchy feely type?
Being that way is OK. It is time that the touchy feely types stop trying to force those that aren't into what they think we should be. It is the same problem as extroverts vs introverts where introverts often find extrovert behavior out right offense but won't say anything about it.
Maybe the group that has the longest list of accomplishments can tell the other group they are wrong.
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Everyone making GPS devices should have known about this but now the Tom-Tom in my car thinks its noon once it gets a GPS lock.
Are there options for paid support like there were for general release of XP? If so, it isn't dead yet.
I think all numbers should get 5 extra digits. Let the PBX or mobile phone decided which of the 100,000 extra numbers to answer and let the rest go to a voice mail system. That would make my phone useful as a voice device again and end the scams.
Oracle is in court claiming Amazon is selling a commodity to the US DOD and therefor shouldn't have an exclusive deal for a long time. The US courts have agreed with that argument in the past. If the courts rule that a specific cloud service is just like any other, then the door is open for all the competition and the big 3 don't have the best price. The 2nd tier cloud providers are much cheaper than the big three and seem to have better tech support.
I've been renting space for my own hardware in data centers for more than 2 decades and late last year I moved almost all of it all to virtual servers. For about a quarter of the money I have much faster servers in the parts of the world where I want them. I could also have 5 global load balancers using anycast and two processing servers for less than $100/mo.
If I give you my number and extension 48524, then my phone won't accept any call to that number except for your number with the proper extension and I know you leaked it because of your bad choice in social media.
The international standards allow US phone number to have 5 more digits so turn them into extensions. That would give everyone 100,000 extensions that their phone or carrier could manage. Turn it on and default all 10 digit numbers to the original ten plus 00000. Work can have the ten plus 99999. Friends get their own number which matches the last 5 of the number they use to call you. Everything else gets rejected.
Old versions of real Unix had printed manual pages. You could start at the beginning and read the whole thing. It was a great way to understand the full scope of a system. Also reading all the entries in a fixed order means your not missing anything.
Long before they were gobbled up by Oracle, Sun used to offer universities cheap sun workstations. They had a trade in program where you could get half off on your upgraded computer by turning in any old sun server. They never asked for the computer back but the same department couldn't use the machine for two upgrades which encouraged it to be recycled into a different department who could then upgrade it to something else. University discount was typically 50% and sometimes 65% and the trade in dropped the cost by an additional half so some departments were buying new hardware at 17% of what a small company would pay. A $10k Sun server at $1,700 was a much more powerful than a pc of the day. When those admins hit the corporate world in the dot.com bubble, they knew Sun hardware and they bought massive amounts of it.
MasterCard and Visa want to get in this business. All the systems they have been building over the last few years have had the capacity to include extensive order details in the records sent to them.
My email address has a + and ! in it. Most systems won't take those characters. The shortest email address I've ever seen used was 5 characters long as it was two letters @ a CC TLD.
Lasers are controlled in the US by 21 CFR 1040 and have been for a very long time. There is a odd loop hole in that if you if have your laser hit a lens that spreads out the beam so that at the end of the laser is larger than an eyeball, it can deliver far more power even if the beam is much smaller far away. Some early traffic speed lasers took advantage of that. The ANSI standard has the same problem. They should require the test at the end of the laser and 100 meters away.
Gamers seem to be moving back to PS2 mice and keyboards so many of the newer motherboards have PS2 ports on them. The two I bought this month had both a keyboard and mouse port. Inside they even had the headers for RS-232 and parallel ports.
I don't know why the parallel ports are heading back. Parallel ports are easy to use much like the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi except they are 5v not 3.3. I'm guessing the makers are looking at the replacement business and much of the stuff that wasn't updated on the Win98 -> Win 7 cycle was because of lack serial and parallel ports to talk to old equipment. Most of the old restaurant use serial ports and the bell signal to open the cash drawer.
People are scanning IPv6 the same way they used to brute force SNMP MIBs.
There are two different issues. First is finding networks and the second is finding hosts on a network.
You start by mapping the routable /32. You can take short cuts if you have access to a global routing table. That drops the number of networks from about 4 billion to less than 2,000 with no scanning at all. Inside each /32 is a /48 to /56. Once again a global routing table will reduce the search space. The right kind of ping can tell you if a major ISP is doing anything with each /56 for a probe. Repeat for each active /56 to find out active /64. Now you have a mostly complete list of active and correctly functional IPv6 networks in the world.
Finding machines on the network is the hard part because they should be hiding behind a 2^64 random number. If they are servers they might have a vanity number like ...::dead:beef or more likely ...::1. Sysadmins will tend to give useful number to external hosts or even workstations. Assuming ..:site:floor:cube will find hosts in large companies. They might use a MAC based address which reduces the search space to known workstation vendors. If someone hits my website with a Dell MAC based IPv6 address, I can assume they have other Dells of about the same age on their network so nearby MAC address might hit a host.
People say IPv6 doesn't do NAT. If you use random /64 addresses, that isn't any different than using random port numbers to hide the way NAT does. The only major difference is if a session has already been established but most cheap NAT routers don't care. If your NAT router can be reset without ending long running sessions (like ssh without keepalives on), your current NAT setup is less secure than using fast rotating IPv6 addresses. There is more entropy in a random 64 bit IPv6 than 16 port NAT source port+sequence number and most only use the source port.
20 years ago a local radio station ran a contest to find local new music. The rules were something along the lines that the band had to have made the album in the last year that had at least 6 songs, they could nominate one of the songs for the contest and they had to live in the listening area. They had about 3,000 albums submitted from a population area of about 3 million. I take that to mean that there is about one album made per year for each 1,000 people. That could mean as many as about 7.2 million new albums a year. and I expect most of them wouldn't be very good.
The recording industry associations are not about selling the new work of artists, they seem to want to restrict access to it so they can keep selling their older catalog stuff.
Most Unix like systems are happy without a "root" user as long as there is a user 0 called something.
I still don't agree with the POSIX standard that allows root to write to mode 000 files. If its 000, it was done for a reason and that means even root shouldn't be able to screw with it particularly if it is root:root mode 000.
Sand based atolls are effectively floating on slightly more sense layers and most of them are in areas where that other layer is flat. The atolls dissolve on one side and get built up on the other by a mix of consistent ocean currents and prevailing winds. That causes the islands to creep along keeping their basic shape until they hit depression or hill on the lower layer. Depressions tends to destroy the atoll and the hills tend to split the atolls in two.
These sinking islands are going to sink weather global warming is true or false but global warming always gets drug into conversation about them which sidelines the discussion.
If the machine is somewhat dead, you can't boot from something else to erase the internal flash and you can't put it in what used to be called target mode.
Even with external storage, if a secret file got moved to swap and the machine dies, that secret is on the flash chips. Encrypted or not, the government mandated procedure says it doesn't leave my security zone until destroyed. These types of government regulations exist in the USA, Canada, Australia, EU, Japan, Russia and China.
I don't care if I can't move the flash to another machine and have it usable without reformatting but it must be removable. In the world of transparent encryption, I should be able to format it with a key of my choice and move it to some other device and enter that key or else it looks like another Clipper chip sleight of hand.
Their non-removable storage is a deal killer. I won't be buying them. I also won't be supporting individual users on two platforms so now all new machines will have to be windows (they insist on native office so no linux), and that means no more approvals for mac lap tops either. I expect that will have a carry on effect future iPhone sales as well.
Disposing of a repairable device goes against the green and e-waste policies too. How am I going to dispose of these since I can shred these things? I don't care if the case is 100 recycled aluminum (as if the old ones where close to that) if the whole thing is as disposable as a beer can.
Non-removable storage is a deal killer. I don't know what gets stored on local computers so it MUST to be wiped before it goes off site for repair.
This means I'm not going to be buying any of these. We have been waiting for years to replace some of the older minis and now I have to figure out what I'm going to do for a replacement. For now banning new Apple stuff from the company will be the policy.
Don't you have to comply with any sort of security polices at Apple?
Finding documentation is part of a clutter problem. Many people can find things in moderate levels of clutter up to a point and then it becomes nearly impossible to find most things. Modern documentation tends to follow the wiki model and that invites clutter unless you also have a librarian to organize that data like wikipedia does. A search engine isn't a substitute for proper organization.
There is also something called "decision fatigue" which is related to "executive function" which limit how many goal seeking decisions you can correctly make in a day. Extra decisions before work can result in fewer correct decisions at work. Example include Obama not choosing his breakfast or suit and Steve Jobs always wearing the same black turtle-neck. By habit they were rationing the decisions they made in a day.
There needs to be a system so that you can buy whatever from a very obnoxious caller and then once the money goes thorough, process the entire chain of transactions under electronic wire fraud.
Companies should be required to correctly answer the question "where did you get my number from" and "tell them and everyone else they are affiliated with to remove my details" and there should be major fines for not complying.
I would be happy for just more digits on the phone number. If 212-555-1234 goes to me, I want 212-555-1234-98765 to go to my phone and all the rest to go to disappear into a "its lenny" type system.
The contracts that towns signed for exclusive cable TV rights included many things that the cable companies aren't doing. There are requirements for educational channels and rules about kids programming. Many towns had deals about rate increases and rollout rates. Many towns could dig out their old contract, figure out how to nullify it and allow a second provider or even take over control of the local assets using eminent domain. Or they could be like a cable company and just change their mind.
If they are worried about e-waste they could give new life to older machines. They could offer 32->64 firmware updates for a bunch of old macs. The hackintosh community already figured out the hard part.
As people age they stop remembering details of scams but seem to remember they are smarter than the scammers so they can't be scammed. The result is they get taken. People who worked in security along with retired police and criminal lawyers are easier to scam after they retire than the average person.
There was a version of MS Word that worked on Unix systems and VT100 style terminals in 1987. Word has made features easier to use since then.
Who would have thought he wasn't the overly emotional touchy feely type?
Being that way is OK. It is time that the touchy feely types stop trying to force those that aren't into what they think we should be. It is the same problem as extroverts vs introverts where introverts often find extrovert behavior out right offense but won't say anything about it.
Maybe the group that has the longest list of accomplishments can tell the other group they are wrong.