My news site has a twitter feed. I could care less about it, other than a handful of people were bugging me to do it. So we put up somewhere around 20 messages a day. That probably puts me into that 0.05%, which really wouldn't be right. That's sad, when you realize that 0.05% is the fluffed up number. Round it off, and you see how much people use it. 0%.
Once in a while I go through and delete all the damned spammers who decide to "follow" my feed. It's pretty obvious. Lots of links, mentions of acacia berries, sex sites, and gray market stock trading.
Our readership, through the various methods, ranked from lowest to highest is.
Twitter
RSS
Mobile devices / smart phones
Daily newsletter
The actual web site.
As far as I'm concerned, Twitter was dead when it started, and still has no practical value.
I didn't confuse it with the meaning of the article, because this came out a few years ago, and was posted here then too. Only a few things come to mind when I see "truck driver" and "bomb" in the title.
1) Truck driver eats too many beans at a greasy spoon diner, gets food poisoning.
2) The FUD stories just post 9/11 about fuel trucks being hijacked and used as rolling bombs (totally media/gov't driven fiction).
3) The guy who's been researching the WWII atomic bombs in significant detail, and wrote a book.
The first isn't news, because it happens all the time. The second isn't news, because it wasn't news when it was claimed to have happened, but never actually happened. And the third isn't news, because it already was news. Good for him, he wrote a book. And publicity is always nice to have, especially when you're self-published.
Most likely the breakdown would be something like:
$2,000 parts (mostly camera and transceiver)
$50 labor
$5,250 government MILSPEC certification
$10,000 cash donation to Senator X who pushed the approval.
$90,000 profit
That's per unit. Sell 100,000 units, and that makes the profit and donation rather healthy.
I'd be pretty sure the gov't would have provisions in place in case a transceiver did fall into the wrong hands. Military aircraft, vehicles, and troops, can all be subject to capture by an enemy. At that point, there is a good chance that any specialized equipment would be captured (along with their weapons, MREs, and fuel in the vehicle).
It's probably not a question of who may see it, but how much it cost. The gov't (and therefore we) pay a small fortune for every one of these innovative new devices deployed. It's definitely worth while for the gov't to want to go collect a stolen unit, rather than just ordering a new one. According to the USAF, that item cost approximately $173,000.
I do wonder if it was a legitimate item, or a home made knockoff that looked close enough, and the title was of the item, that the gov't believed it was a legitimate item. That still counts as far as their case goes. If you have what you say is an illegal item, and you try to sell it as that illegal item, then it's an illegal item.
If I went on Craigslist, and offered up 10 kilos of heroin, and had photos of what looked like 10 kilos of heroin, I'd be going to jail for selling 10 kilos of heroin, and anything that may have been involved in my procurement of said item.
You know, I've used a lot of keyboards and mice over the years. They've been both items that I've bought for myself, and items on other people's computers.
My girlfriend has a Naga Razor. She was very excited about it when she bought it. The first one died after about 4 hours of using it. It just blinked off, to never come back to life. The second one has been working for a few months. It has a gridword of numbered buttons on the side. After a few months, various buttons stopped working. The scroll wheel is behaving weird, and doesn't always click when pressed. The forward and back buttons doesn't work predictably.
I've been very content with the cheap mice and keyboards. I at least demand optical mice (does anyone use ball mice any more?), and a scroll wheel that clicks. For the keyboard. I expect standard layout buttons (ins, del, home, arrows). Other than those wild expectations, I see no performance difference in other devices, other than bragging rights. Who really cares if I'm using a hand crafted platinum with gold inlay mouse that cost more than a new car?:)
These are the step by step instructions on how to "write" a web site, with user registration, authentication, management, public and members only pages. I quoted "write", because you don't write one line of code. The only typing is to change the default filename to what you want, to enter your username and password, and to put in whatever text you want.
People who do this consider themselves "developers". If you buy VS2010, you'll be spending from $799 to $2,169 (MS MSRP). Then you need a Windows server to go with it. That's $469 to $2,999 (MS MSRP). Oh and the DB. MSSQL server is $3,500 to $54,990. Since you've gone that far, you'll want your Exchange server to go with it too, for $699 to $3,999. I didn't even go into the CAL's, And lets not forget, one set of servers isn't safe, you want redundancy. And you want a couple Active Directory servers, and the matching Microsoft Professional (or higher) workstations so they can join the domain, and Microsoft Outlook (almost always purchased in the Microsoft Office package).
In the end, you have a developer who you've paid a lot of money to, a whole lot of money spent on Microsoft software, and servers. And what do you have? An enterprise based on something that someone pointed and clicked through, but they can't give you extra functionality. If you want something outside of the scope of the warm fuzzy point and click environment, you'll spend an extra fortune, and still be vendor locked and screwed when the platform is obsolete. Sure, it's great in 2011, that you've built everything in on their 2008 to 2010 platform, but what happens in 2016, just 5 years from now? Take the whole exercise, and do it again, so your developer (or another one who sings the praises of Microsoft) can point and click through another "enterprise" web application that your enterprise will be shoe-horned into. It may or may not suit all of your needs, but since you spent so much money on it already, it must be the "right" way. And sure as hell now you can't just switch to another platform.
Or you go with a real programmer, who can sit down and write something in C/C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc, etc, etc... If they do their jobs properly, they'll have the job done right, on time, and way under the budget outlined above.
You may find that in some environments, there is more work than one person can handle. There are one or more teams to do work. There is frequently a manager level, and then a director level above him. I'm the director level, although I take on harder projects at all levels. Things are delegated constantly, so my teams are working efficiently, and we all get our tasks done.
In this case, he could do my work, finishing the re-engineering plans for a large portion of the network, to implement that night, or write a little piece of code. He opted for the little piece of code, and I kept the major re-engineering task.
So your environment has one person who does everything? That's really cute.... and... at this time, our network is a mixed environment, equal parts Linux and Windows. The Linux machines do quite a bit of the hard work without fail, and I can find very good people to work on those issues all the time. Finding people of the same caliber for the Windows tasks is a lot harder.
By "guys like in the article", I assume you're talking about the founder and CEO, who's discussing his hiring practices, and observations of employee behavior.
I actually find his evaluation to be pretty close to factual. Most Windows driven developers who swear by MS products, frequently don't know much more than "I point, I click, it works."
I was recently sitting in on a meeting where two developers were pushing the development of a new site. The CEO had a clear plan of what he wanted, and it was perfectly reasonable. They gave an outline for their plan. It was later demonstrated that... "In Visual Studio, all I have to do is click this, then click this, and then it's done." There was a lot of MS jargon thrown in. While I'm fluent in it, I refuse to repeat it.:) They still were unable to provide the ability for some very basic functionality. Their claims ranged from "It can't be done" to "It would take years to develop". What? I program, or have programmed, in several languages fluently. I'll admit, I don't do much Coldfusion nor Java any more, as I haven't had any demand for it. I also associate myself with a wide variety of very good developers. While I may not code in their languages, I can read and understand what they're doing. There's a huge difference between seeing a function and knowing what it does by name, and needing to look up the syntax for each one if I were to try to do it myself. In any of the languages I'm fluent in, the functionality the CEO asked for was trivial, and even if it were to be integrated into a completed project, it would be less than a week to add the functionality in.
Their stopping point was "Microsoft doesn't provide it in Visual Studio, we can't do it.". So far in seeing Microsoft based developers in the real world, that is not the exception.
So as the author said, if you want a 1.6oz burger, the McDonalds kitchen is perfect, and you can churn them out all day. If you want the 1.7oz burger cut square, with garnish and a crinkle cut pickle instead of a sad limp excuse for a steamed pickled cucumber, you'd better find someone who isn't primarily focused on doing the predominant MS methods.
There are perfectly good.NET developers out there, who don't use the crutches of the common tools, but they are rare. There are people who depend on crutches of their languages though. I've seen "PHP Programmers" who are webmasters as long as you use a template for a common CMS. Ask them to write "Hello World", and they're lost.
I asked an ASP person to write me a simple "open a file, write some arbitrary string, and close the file". Two hours and 50 lines of code later, it was done. The mention of file locking just got a blank stare. I just said "forget it".
I remember when that happened. It was about the same time that they determined "unlimited" was actually connected for 4 hours/day, measured in 1 hour blocks. 120 hours a month wasn't acceptable. My machine would come online hourly, check in with my web server, see if I wanted to do something, and then either email me or disconnect. They would have billed at 720 hours.
The day the announcement came out was the day I switched providers to a local one. Sure they sucked, but I could still have my machine check in. It wasn't for a few more years until "broadband" was available in my area. Whee! Cablemodem! I can stay online all the time. What a novel idea.:)
I had that argument with a tier 1 provider that went something like that. It was about 95th percentile utilization. They claimed to measure every 5 minutes at the interface. I told them I had to measure every 2 minutes, because the counters would loop. (hint, they couldn't poll every 5 minutes without running into the same problem).
It went on for a couple days. I provided my logs showing all the 2 minute samples, and the 95th percentile. I asked them to provide the same for comparison. They couldn't.
Mysteriously, after that their measurement was dead on. Well, close enough. If they said.6.03GB/s, and I said 6.02GB/s at 95th percentile, it wasn't worth arguing. At that level, they start becoming a lot more cooperative too.:) We had a T1 in one of the offices from another provider, and it was a pain to get anyone with a clue on the phone to troubleshoot a problem.
You don't even have to go that far. A friend of mine is on his local (part of his state) ISP, which is the only choice there. He was getting gouged for usage that I didn't believe was possible. So we went looking around (Google is your friend), and found a freeware program that graphs his usage. On the next months bill, they tried to gouge him again, so he told them his real usage, so they agreed. They tried that for 3 of the next 6 months, and every time he was able to tell them the right numbers. They finally gave up after that.
I do my graphing on my router with the Tomato firmware. I haven't needed it, it's just for me to understand why something is slow. Of course, my house has multiple machines, and his (the guy in the previous paragraph) only had one.
Actually, that Snopes debunking is in relation to specific celebrities. It can and does happen. It only took a quick Google search on "Rib removal surgery". The second link is for Dr. Aaron Stone in Los Angeles, who does do the surgery. The third link is the Snopes article you mentioned, and then the fourth link is to the Wikipedia article referencing the procedure. I know, Wikipedia is the weakest evidence you can possibly provide, but still.
If you want something done, if you look hard enough you'll find a doctor to do it. But hey, live in your happy little world, where you believe everything you see. If I wanted to BS you, I would have come up really good lies. The truth is weird enough.
Someone has to run the servers and network that will support you millions of perverts ^H^H^H^H^H^H users. Our network was one of the first in most facilities, to need GigE connections, and our bandwidth was high enough to compare to the Mae-East graphs (when they were public) and be able to say we were responsible for 10% of their aggregate utilization.:)
I haven't worked there in several years. The only thing I miss is my well tuned server farms, and massive bandwidth to do with as I wished (as long as the customers were satisfied). We gave back to the net at large, such as hosting a few distro mirrors, anti-spam services mirrors (Spamcop, and our own in-house service), sites and streaming for indie music labels, etc. Although they used "a lot" of bandwidth, it never accounted for even 1% of our total usage. What's 20 to 30 Mb/s on multiple GigE lines?
The "good guys" are the ones with the robots. The "bad guys" are the ones without them.
It's kind of like, the "good guys" always win the wars, because their side is writing the history books. The "bad guys" are the ones who were bombed to oblivion, either with conventional bombs or nukes.
Consider World War II. As written by the allied forces. America was not involved in the war. We were innocently sitting by, letting them fight it out. Suddenly out of nowhere, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. No one expected any such thing. We were not involved. Just ignore the fleet of about 100 ships in port, 3 aircraft carriers nearby, about 400 aircraft on the ground, and all the troops.
If it were written by the Axis forces. America was staging for a strong attack against Axis forces. A pre-emptive strike managed to substantially reduce their strength, which reduced their ability to harm Axis soldiers and civilians.
And we all know which way it went. Dropping two nukes on Japan ended it. Consider both points of view.
For the allied forces, it was a strong blow to prove our military superiority, which ended the war.
For the axis forces, the massacre of about 200,000 civilians forced our surrender, to save countless lives from further attacks.
That is not to belittle the events of the war, or the tragic loss of life on both sides. It's only to illustrate how the perception of the outcome from such events is totally tainted by those who won. Of course the "good guys" won.
Ya, it would seem like something fun. Until the reality hits you. Conversations between the girls revolve around fingernail polish, clothes (even though they're usually not wearing any at the time), PMS, and pop-culture things that I could do without hearing. There are plenty of discussions about body mutilation, which can include stupid piercings, tramp-stamp tattoos, and of course plastic surgery to satisfy their own insecurities. Everything (and everything) that can be cut, poked, marked, de-marked, enlarged, shrunk, and... well, I'm sure I missed a few. Everything from the toes to the hair, including all the naughty bits that I really don't want to disgust anyone with.
If you're really desperate, start searching Google for abdominoplasty, labiaplasty liposuction, mammonplasty, otoplasty, rhinoplasty,... I can't even find a technical name for plastic surgery of the toes, or removing the 10-12 ribs, but they get done too. Between several dozen idiots, you can get a lot of facts.:)
The most attractive ones, are very frequently the dumbest. That doesn't mean the ugly ones (on the end of the scale of still hot enough to be filmed naked) are smart. They're dumb as rocks too. Intelligent ones who recognize a quick buck to be made are equally distributed throughout, but probably only make up less than 5% of them. The worse are probably the ones who stay in the industry to feed their expensive drug habits. They'll do film gigs where they can, and then various strip clubs when they're not filming, and go from making money dancing, to "private entertainment" at the location of your choice.
Well, an expert in breasts. 8 years working in the adult entertainment industry can teach you an awful lot. Well, more than you'd ever want to know. Really. I don't recommend it to anyone, unless you want to have a jaded view on the world. Well, I guess working that long in customer service could do the same thing.:)
Snakes? Well, I hate them, almost to a degree of phobia. It's good to know your enemy. Understand them. Rationalize them. Then you can work it out. Well, maybe. I tolerate snakes up to 8 feet from me, and behind something solid enough for them not to come any closer.
Lets not forget the people who type their search query in the URL line, who are completely dependent on search plugins.
I've seen people go through the drill of going TO google and typing http://example.com/ . I've been setting up brand new sites, on new hostnames, and had to start a remote session to their machine to see how they were screwing it up. No, it doesn't work if Google doesn't know about the site.:) Of course there are plenty of people who don't know exactly what a slash or forward slash are. They'll put a dash, underscore, backslash, or type out slash. I guess it keeps newbies out of slashdot.org, or http;--/.ohrg , as it may be.
4. 'only' for as long as Microsoft does not fix SNI-support (name based virtual hosting for SSL/TLS) in Windows XP so IE and Safari can use SNI, ohh, that won't happen. Windows XP has 51% of the Windows marketshare.:-( Or if we all get IPv6 ofcourse... hmm.
Well...
Apache did the fix in the 2.2.x tree starting with Apache 2.2.12 and OpenSSL 0.9.8j. Some people haven't deployed, tested, or trust a new tree. I know in the earlier days of Apache 2.0.x, I ran into significant problems that made it impossible for me to run it in production (heavy traffic resulted in a mandatory reboot after about a week). That has since been fixed, but I've only recently moved my own stuff to Apache 2.2.x
Then the Apache 2.2.x documentation, which clearly states that you can, again with the above prerequisites.
We can argue "but it's been over 2 years, everyone should be upgraded by now.", but in reality not everyone is. Many networks don't believe in patches, much less OS upgrades. I've seen infrastructures running on 10+ year old OS installations, because "that's what we tested with when we first set up, that's the way it will be". So even if your sysadmin is diligent about upgrading software and patching, they may still not be up to speed, if it happens to require an OS upgrade to get say the correct OpenSSL series to install.
I used to give it 5 years, where the majority of customers would have upgraded their browsers. Now we have people still stuck with MSIE 6.0, either from their own paranoia, or poor company IT policy. It's never been uncommon to see *nix machines running with years of uptime. Unfortunately that means they never went down for full OS upgrades. So, SNI won't see wide deployment for at least a few more years.
I'm sure Microsoft will catch up in time, likely (unofficially) porting over Apache and OpenSSL's work. Upgrading Microsoft products are a harder sell than upgrading Linux. For the Linux world, it only involves a little downtime while you do it. With Microsoft products, it's downtime and the cost of the new servers software. When the majority of folks are upgraded *and* become aware of the new abilities, will we really see mass SNI hosting.
I way back in the infancy of the Internet, I worked at a hosting company. They assigned an IP per domain for http sites. We had huge arguments (err, discussions) about the feasbility of virtualhosts. Ya, that ate up a substantial pool of IPs until we finally switched, and then they were amazed how many unused IPs we had. Those were recovered by the provider later when we switched and requested a smaller address space.
Wow, I hadn't run across that site. I'll have to try it out, and see how well they work. The only reason some of my sites are self-signed (non-public facing) is that I don't want to spend $20/yr on an interface I only see once every month or two.:) Still, a self-signed cert is better than plaintext.
But as we've seen proven, the CPU load isn't as big of an issue as is claimed.
The reports where people said it was, were from an awful long time ago, discussing high loads and CPUs that were measured in Mhz (i.e., Ghz CPUs weren't even imagined yet).
Right now, we have to look at a few issues.
1) Users are familiar with typing http:/// . If you went https only, without a redirection from http:/// you'd lose traffic. Simple fix, do a redirection.
2) Not everyone supports https still. If you include a piece from a 3rd party, you'll either get a broken lock, or the 3rd party data won't show.
3) Google Adsense doesn't support it. Still. And people have been asking for years. They are a major revenue source for a lot of sites.
4) Hosting https sites still require a unique IP for each site. If I, a a hosting provider, have 1000 sites on a server, I'd rather use one IP, than 1000 IPs.
5) SSL certs must be renewed. You must have the cooperation of the provider. Certs are no longer $100/yr, if you shop around a little. Trustico has provided perfectly functional certs for $20/yr for a long time (with discounts for multi-year purchases). I've been using them for several years. For a blog that has very cheap hosting, even the $20 doesn't necessarily make sense.
6) The time where there were huge compatibility issues with SSL implementations in browsers is gone, but you will still find the occasional app that doesn't have SSL compiled in by default, but that has become rare. At very least, all modern browsers support https:/// out of the box, regardless of where you are at.
The biggest issue is, users don't generally care. On my site, I have a warning every page if you're viewing insecure, and encouraging you to click the link to switch to the https version. Less than 10% of the users ever switch up to the https version. The only time I enforce it is when a users logs in. When they try to log in, it forces them to https, and keeps them there for the duration of their session.
Wow, lots of questions.. But thank you for asking.
What happens when the disaster/antichrist/zombies/alien-invasion/whatever starts killing off members, catches some members on vacation somewheres else entirely, cripples/debilitates members, or similar?
Well, they have the plan, and they know where we're going. It's the unfortunately decision between "save everyone" and "save the ones you can". That's why we set gracious times to get to each waypoint. If one of the party is starting from elsewhere (say 1000 miles away), it would be up to them to figure out how to get there.
There are plenty of things that could happen from their initial starting point to the first waypoint where they meet everyone. Maybe they did not survive the initial disaster. Maybe they found another group who had a better plan. Maybe they make it across their front yard, and broke their ankle. Traveling in teams is ideal. If one person is injured to the point of not making the walk, others on the team could help. For the most part, the teams are families (blood relatives, significant others, etc), so there shouldn't be anyone traveling by themselves.
What if the disaster involves something (or occurs during anything) that hinders any kind of transportation for more than a week (e.g. blizzard or ice storm)?
A blizzard or ice storm doesn't really qualify as an apocalyptic event. The snow will stop, utilities will be restored rapidly.
Even when everything goes right and you all make it to sanctuary, you'll likely have to deal with the usual inter-personal conflicts that tend to arise in any group that's not already used to living together 24/7/365. That latter part is a natural result of any group of mammals getting together for the first time - you gotta sort out the Alpha Male, etc... have you sorted that out, and actually tested it out under simulated conditions?
Well... Things happen. Me, being the good Alpha Male, would do my best to lead to "sanctuary" [flashbacks of Logan's Run], but I recognize the fact that the group may decide they want someone else in the group to lead, or they may split into another group. That's normal for our species.
What happens if one of your members becomes diabetic and dependent on insulin (or, say, finds themselves in a similar medical condition or pre-apocalyptic injury that requires civilized society to remain alive)? You kick 'em out of the group? And what happens if a few members start telling their girlfriends/neighbors/etc?
Well, that's part of the survival supplies. If we cannot find a way to help them, they're still screwed regardless of where they go.
Incidentally, if you can walk to something in about a day or two, err, so can pretty much anyone else who has working legs. How do you fend off folks who are just following along - do you shoot them? What if there are children tagging along?
Well, as long as they're not screaming "hey, we're going to Utopia! Our friends know how to save us all!", it's kind of doubtful that too many people would just go following some complete strangers off to who knows where.
Generally, it's a good thing to have extra hands in your group. I by myself I can hopefully survive. As a sufficient size group, we have people who can farm, cook, rebuild whatever technology we can get our hands on (i.e., improvised hydroelectric power, plumbing, refrigeration, transportation).
What if there's a group of similarly-armed folks who happen to notice you (and maybe a friend or two) wandering along towards your waypoint lugging all those supplies? Can you deal with an ambush or attack by folks who know that locale far better than you do?
You'd have to also calculate in attrition. Stores come and go, it's just the way it is. So some open, some close, both legal and illegal.
There's no way for us to get the accurate numbers. It's not like China is exactly open about the happenings there, and definitely we couldn't get accurate numbers on illegal operations. Just like in the US, most of those numbers are swiftly extracted from the posterior orifice of a politician.
You know, I call my emergency plan "The Apocalypse Plan" or "The End of the World Plan"
The plan is distributed throughout my group of "survivors". Three meeting points, with the plan for the final destination are included.
Supplies include weapons and plenty of ammunition, food (MREs, water, water treatment, etc), clothing, personal supplies (toothpaste, toilet paper, feminine needs), medical supplies (basic first responder kit), and vehicle supplies (extra gas, spare parts, etc).
And of course, people ask "Why weapons?" Well, since this world is such a kind gentle place, it'd be perfectly safe walking or driving through a group of desperate people with enough supplies to live a few weeks on. Oh ya, you wouldn't be safe. Beyond that, you may (and likely will) need to use them for hunting when the food supplies run out.
If it is a prolonged period of civil unrest, you may find weapons your best friend. Well, I guess the best friend is the person who can use the weapons most efficiently.
The meeting points are staged along a predetermined evacuation route. Multiple routes are provided to each waypoint. Each waypoint was chosen for relative isolation, access to fresh water and wildlife, and access by car, large vehicle (bus/large truck) and aircraft. So you should be able to walk, drive, or fly there (there are a few licensed pilots in the group).
We all know the parties who should be able to arrive, so once the entire party has grouped at one of the waypoints (hopefully the first).
Distance to the waypoints and regrouping times (how long we wait) is based on at least double the walking time. If it takes an hour to drive, or a day to walk, we give 3 days. So waypoint 1 would be 3 days (E+3d). Waypoint 2 would be 2 weeks (E+17d). Waypoint 3 would be another 2 weeks (E+31d).
We plan to add shortwave radio to the plan. Right now, we only have one licensed operator. Not that licenses matter much in a state of emergency. When your region has just been leveled by a natural disaster, having the FAA show up to fine or arrest you would be welcome. "Fine, arrest me. Get me out of here."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, celebrities, news sites, and spammers.
My news site has a twitter feed. I could care less about it, other than a handful of people were bugging me to do it. So we put up somewhere around 20 messages a day. That probably puts me into that 0.05%, which really wouldn't be right. That's sad, when you realize that 0.05% is the fluffed up number. Round it off, and you see how much people use it. 0%.
Once in a while I go through and delete all the damned spammers who decide to "follow" my feed. It's pretty obvious. Lots of links, mentions of acacia berries, sex sites, and gray market stock trading.
Our readership, through the various methods, ranked from lowest to highest is.
As far as I'm concerned, Twitter was dead when it started, and still has no practical value.
Oops, too early for me to be a /. editor too.
"...tomic ..."
I didn't confuse it with the meaning of the article, because this came out a few years ago, and was posted here then too. Only a few things come to mind when I see "truck driver" and "bomb" in the title.
1) Truck driver eats too many beans at a greasy spoon diner, gets food poisoning.
2) The FUD stories just post 9/11 about fuel trucks being hijacked and used as rolling bombs (totally media/gov't driven fiction).
3) The guy who's been researching the WWII atomic bombs in significant detail, and wrote a book.
The first isn't news, because it happens all the time. The second isn't news, because it wasn't news when it was claimed to have happened, but never actually happened. And the third isn't news, because it already was news. Good for him, he wrote a book. And publicity is always nice to have, especially when you're self-published.
...omic ...
Most likely the breakdown would be something like:
$2,000 parts (mostly camera and transceiver)
$50 labor
$5,250 government MILSPEC certification
$10,000 cash donation to Senator X who pushed the approval.
$90,000 profit
That's per unit. Sell 100,000 units, and that makes the profit and donation rather healthy.
I'd be pretty sure the gov't would have provisions in place in case a transceiver did fall into the wrong hands. Military aircraft, vehicles, and troops, can all be subject to capture by an enemy. At that point, there is a good chance that any specialized equipment would be captured (along with their weapons, MREs, and fuel in the vehicle).
It's probably not a question of who may see it, but how much it cost. The gov't (and therefore we) pay a small fortune for every one of these innovative new devices deployed. It's definitely worth while for the gov't to want to go collect a stolen unit, rather than just ordering a new one. According to the USAF, that item cost approximately $173,000.
I do wonder if it was a legitimate item, or a home made knockoff that looked close enough, and the title was of the item, that the gov't believed it was a legitimate item. That still counts as far as their case goes. If you have what you say is an illegal item, and you try to sell it as that illegal item, then it's an illegal item.
If I went on Craigslist, and offered up 10 kilos of heroin, and had photos of what looked like 10 kilos of heroin, I'd be going to jail for selling 10 kilos of heroin, and anything that may have been involved in my procurement of said item.
You know, I've used a lot of keyboards and mice over the years. They've been both items that I've bought for myself, and items on other people's computers.
My girlfriend has a Naga Razor. She was very excited about it when she bought it. The first one died after about 4 hours of using it. It just blinked off, to never come back to life. The second one has been working for a few months. It has a gridword of numbered buttons on the side. After a few months, various buttons stopped working. The scroll wheel is behaving weird, and doesn't always click when pressed. The forward and back buttons doesn't work predictably.
I've been very content with the cheap mice and keyboards. I at least demand optical mice (does anyone use ball mice any more?), and a scroll wheel that clicks. For the keyboard. I expect standard layout buttons (ins, del, home, arrows). Other than those wild expectations, I see no performance difference in other devices, other than bragging rights. Who really cares if I'm using a hand crafted platinum with gold inlay mouse that cost more than a new car? :)
Well, I could describe it in detail, but Microsoft has been nice enough to have plenty of step by step instructions.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/879kf95c.aspx
These are the step by step instructions on how to "write" a web site, with user registration, authentication, management, public and members only pages. I quoted "write", because you don't write one line of code. The only typing is to change the default filename to what you want, to enter your username and password, and to put in whatever text you want.
People who do this consider themselves "developers". If you buy VS2010, you'll be spending from $799 to $2,169 (MS MSRP). Then you need a Windows server to go with it. That's $469 to $2,999 (MS MSRP). Oh and the DB. MSSQL server is $3,500 to $54,990. Since you've gone that far, you'll want your Exchange server to go with it too, for $699 to $3,999. I didn't even go into the CAL's, And lets not forget, one set of servers isn't safe, you want redundancy. And you want a couple Active Directory servers, and the matching Microsoft Professional (or higher) workstations so they can join the domain, and Microsoft Outlook (almost always purchased in the Microsoft Office package).
In the end, you have a developer who you've paid a lot of money to, a whole lot of money spent on Microsoft software, and servers. And what do you have? An enterprise based on something that someone pointed and clicked through, but they can't give you extra functionality. If you want something outside of the scope of the warm fuzzy point and click environment, you'll spend an extra fortune, and still be vendor locked and screwed when the platform is obsolete. Sure, it's great in 2011, that you've built everything in on their 2008 to 2010 platform, but what happens in 2016, just 5 years from now? Take the whole exercise, and do it again, so your developer (or another one who sings the praises of Microsoft) can point and click through another "enterprise" web application that your enterprise will be shoe-horned into. It may or may not suit all of your needs, but since you spent so much money on it already, it must be the "right" way. And sure as hell now you can't just switch to another platform.
Or you go with a real programmer, who can sit down and write something in C/C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc, etc, etc... If they do their jobs properly, they'll have the job done right, on time, and way under the budget outlined above.
Did I flesh that out enough for you?
You may find that in some environments, there is more work than one person can handle. There are one or more teams to do work. There is frequently a manager level, and then a director level above him. I'm the director level, although I take on harder projects at all levels. Things are delegated constantly, so my teams are working efficiently, and we all get our tasks done.
In this case, he could do my work, finishing the re-engineering plans for a large portion of the network, to implement that night, or write a little piece of code. He opted for the little piece of code, and I kept the major re-engineering task.
So your environment has one person who does everything? That's really cute. ... and ... at this time, our network is a mixed environment, equal parts Linux and Windows. The Linux machines do quite a bit of the hard work without fail, and I can find very good people to work on those issues all the time. Finding people of the same caliber for the Windows tasks is a lot harder.
By "guys like in the article", I assume you're talking about the founder and CEO, who's discussing his hiring practices, and observations of employee behavior.
I actually find his evaluation to be pretty close to factual. Most Windows driven developers who swear by MS products, frequently don't know much more than "I point, I click, it works."
I was recently sitting in on a meeting where two developers were pushing the development of a new site. The CEO had a clear plan of what he wanted, and it was perfectly reasonable. They gave an outline for their plan. It was later demonstrated that ... "In Visual Studio, all I have to do is click this, then click this, and then it's done." There was a lot of MS jargon thrown in. While I'm fluent in it, I refuse to repeat it. :) They still were unable to provide the ability for some very basic functionality. Their claims ranged from "It can't be done" to "It would take years to develop". What? I program, or have programmed, in several languages fluently. I'll admit, I don't do much Coldfusion nor Java any more, as I haven't had any demand for it. I also associate myself with a wide variety of very good developers. While I may not code in their languages, I can read and understand what they're doing. There's a huge difference between seeing a function and knowing what it does by name, and needing to look up the syntax for each one if I were to try to do it myself. In any of the languages I'm fluent in, the functionality the CEO asked for was trivial, and even if it were to be integrated into a completed project, it would be less than a week to add the functionality in.
Their stopping point was "Microsoft doesn't provide it in Visual Studio, we can't do it.". So far in seeing Microsoft based developers in the real world, that is not the exception.
So as the author said, if you want a 1.6oz burger, the McDonalds kitchen is perfect, and you can churn them out all day. If you want the 1.7oz burger cut square, with garnish and a crinkle cut pickle instead of a sad limp excuse for a steamed pickled cucumber, you'd better find someone who isn't primarily focused on doing the predominant MS methods.
There are perfectly good .NET developers out there, who don't use the crutches of the common tools, but they are rare. There are people who depend on crutches of their languages though. I've seen "PHP Programmers" who are webmasters as long as you use a template for a common CMS. Ask them to write "Hello World", and they're lost.
I asked an ASP person to write me a simple "open a file, write some arbitrary string, and close the file". Two hours and 50 lines of code later, it was done. The mention of file locking just got a blank stare. I just said "forget it".
I remember when that happened. It was about the same time that they determined "unlimited" was actually connected for 4 hours/day, measured in 1 hour blocks. 120 hours a month wasn't acceptable. My machine would come online hourly, check in with my web server, see if I wanted to do something, and then either email me or disconnect. They would have billed at 720 hours.
The day the announcement came out was the day I switched providers to a local one. Sure they sucked, but I could still have my machine check in. It wasn't for a few more years until "broadband" was available in my area. Whee! Cablemodem! I can stay online all the time. What a novel idea. :)
I had that argument with a tier 1 provider that went something like that. It was about 95th percentile utilization. They claimed to measure every 5 minutes at the interface. I told them I had to measure every 2 minutes, because the counters would loop. (hint, they couldn't poll every 5 minutes without running into the same problem).
It went on for a couple days. I provided my logs showing all the 2 minute samples, and the 95th percentile. I asked them to provide the same for comparison. They couldn't.
Mysteriously, after that their measurement was dead on. Well, close enough. If they said.6.03GB/s, and I said 6.02GB/s at 95th percentile, it wasn't worth arguing. At that level, they start becoming a lot more cooperative too. :) We had a T1 in one of the offices from another provider, and it was a pain to get anyone with a clue on the phone to troubleshoot a problem.
You don't even have to go that far. A friend of mine is on his local (part of his state) ISP, which is the only choice there. He was getting gouged for usage that I didn't believe was possible. So we went looking around (Google is your friend), and found a freeware program that graphs his usage. On the next months bill, they tried to gouge him again, so he told them his real usage, so they agreed. They tried that for 3 of the next 6 months, and every time he was able to tell them the right numbers. They finally gave up after that.
I do my graphing on my router with the Tomato firmware. I haven't needed it, it's just for me to understand why something is slow. Of course, my house has multiple machines, and his (the guy in the previous paragraph) only had one.
Actually, that Snopes debunking is in relation to specific celebrities. It can and does happen. It only took a quick Google search on "Rib removal surgery". The second link is for Dr. Aaron Stone in Los Angeles, who does do the surgery. The third link is the Snopes article you mentioned, and then the fourth link is to the Wikipedia article referencing the procedure. I know, Wikipedia is the weakest evidence you can possibly provide, but still.
If you want something done, if you look hard enough you'll find a doctor to do it. But hey, live in your happy little world, where you believe everything you see. If I wanted to BS you, I would have come up really good lies. The truth is weird enough.
Someone has to run the servers and network that will support you millions of perverts ^H^H^H^H^H^H users. Our network was one of the first in most facilities, to need GigE connections, and our bandwidth was high enough to compare to the Mae-East graphs (when they were public) and be able to say we were responsible for 10% of their aggregate utilization. :)
I haven't worked there in several years. The only thing I miss is my well tuned server farms, and massive bandwidth to do with as I wished (as long as the customers were satisfied). We gave back to the net at large, such as hosting a few distro mirrors, anti-spam services mirrors (Spamcop, and our own in-house service), sites and streaming for indie music labels, etc. Although they used "a lot" of bandwidth, it never accounted for even 1% of our total usage. What's 20 to 30 Mb/s on multiple GigE lines?
The "good guys" are the ones with the robots. The "bad guys" are the ones without them.
It's kind of like, the "good guys" always win the wars, because their side is writing the history books. The "bad guys" are the ones who were bombed to oblivion, either with conventional bombs or nukes.
Consider World War II. As written by the allied forces. America was not involved in the war. We were innocently sitting by, letting them fight it out. Suddenly out of nowhere, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. No one expected any such thing. We were not involved. Just ignore the fleet of about 100 ships in port, 3 aircraft carriers nearby, about 400 aircraft on the ground, and all the troops.
If it were written by the Axis forces. America was staging for a strong attack against Axis forces. A pre-emptive strike managed to substantially reduce their strength, which reduced their ability to harm Axis soldiers and civilians.
And we all know which way it went. Dropping two nukes on Japan ended it. Consider both points of view.
For the allied forces, it was a strong blow to prove our military superiority, which ended the war.
For the axis forces, the massacre of about 200,000 civilians forced our surrender, to save countless lives from further attacks.
That is not to belittle the events of the war, or the tragic loss of life on both sides. It's only to illustrate how the perception of the outcome from such events is totally tainted by those who won. Of course the "good guys" won.
How about those WMD's now.
Ya, it would seem like something fun. Until the reality hits you. Conversations between the girls revolve around fingernail polish, clothes (even though they're usually not wearing any at the time), PMS, and pop-culture things that I could do without hearing. There are plenty of discussions about body mutilation, which can include stupid piercings, tramp-stamp tattoos, and of course plastic surgery to satisfy their own insecurities. Everything (and everything) that can be cut, poked, marked, de-marked, enlarged, shrunk, and ... well, I'm sure I missed a few. Everything from the toes to the hair, including all the naughty bits that I really don't want to disgust anyone with.
If you're really desperate, start searching Google for abdominoplasty, labiaplasty liposuction, mammonplasty, otoplasty, rhinoplasty, ... I can't even find a technical name for plastic surgery of the toes, or removing the 10-12 ribs, but they get done too. Between several dozen idiots, you can get a lot of facts. :)
The most attractive ones, are very frequently the dumbest. That doesn't mean the ugly ones (on the end of the scale of still hot enough to be filmed naked) are smart. They're dumb as rocks too. Intelligent ones who recognize a quick buck to be made are equally distributed throughout, but probably only make up less than 5% of them. The worse are probably the ones who stay in the industry to feed their expensive drug habits. They'll do film gigs where they can, and then various strip clubs when they're not filming, and go from making money dancing, to "private entertainment" at the location of your choice.
What were you asking again?
Well, an expert in breasts. 8 years working in the adult entertainment industry can teach you an awful lot. Well, more than you'd ever want to know. Really. I don't recommend it to anyone, unless you want to have a jaded view on the world. Well, I guess working that long in customer service could do the same thing. :)
Snakes? Well, I hate them, almost to a degree of phobia. It's good to know your enemy. Understand them. Rationalize them. Then you can work it out. Well, maybe. I tolerate snakes up to 8 feet from me, and behind something solid enough for them not to come any closer.
Lets not forget the people who type their search query in the URL line, who are completely dependent on search plugins.
I've seen people go through the drill of going TO google and typing http://example.com/ . I've been setting up brand new sites, on new hostnames, and had to start a remote session to their machine to see how they were screwing it up. No, it doesn't work if Google doesn't know about the site. :) Of course there are plenty of people who don't know exactly what a slash or forward slash are. They'll put a dash, underscore, backslash, or type out slash. I guess it keeps newbies out of slashdot.org, or http;--/.ohrg , as it may be.
Well...
Apache did the fix in the 2.2.x tree starting with Apache 2.2.12 and OpenSSL 0.9.8j. Some people haven't deployed, tested, or trust a new tree. I know in the earlier days of Apache 2.0.x, I ran into significant problems that made it impossible for me to run it in production (heavy traffic resulted in a mandatory reboot after about a week). That has since been fixed, but I've only recently moved my own stuff to Apache 2.2.x
See the Apache 2.0.x documentation, which clearly states you can't do it.
Then the Apache 2.2.x documentation, which clearly states that you can, again with the above prerequisites.
We can argue "but it's been over 2 years, everyone should be upgraded by now.", but in reality not everyone is. Many networks don't believe in patches, much less OS upgrades. I've seen infrastructures running on 10+ year old OS installations, because "that's what we tested with when we first set up, that's the way it will be". So even if your sysadmin is diligent about upgrading software and patching, they may still not be up to speed, if it happens to require an OS upgrade to get say the correct OpenSSL series to install.
I used to give it 5 years, where the majority of customers would have upgraded their browsers. Now we have people still stuck with MSIE 6.0, either from their own paranoia, or poor company IT policy. It's never been uncommon to see *nix machines running with years of uptime. Unfortunately that means they never went down for full OS upgrades. So, SNI won't see wide deployment for at least a few more years.
I'm sure Microsoft will catch up in time, likely (unofficially) porting over Apache and OpenSSL's work. Upgrading Microsoft products are a harder sell than upgrading Linux. For the Linux world, it only involves a little downtime while you do it. With Microsoft products, it's downtime and the cost of the new servers software. When the majority of folks are upgraded *and* become aware of the new abilities, will we really see mass SNI hosting.
I way back in the infancy of the Internet, I worked at a hosting company. They assigned an IP per domain for http sites. We had huge arguments (err, discussions) about the feasbility of virtualhosts. Ya, that ate up a substantial pool of IPs until we finally switched, and then they were amazed how many unused IPs we had. Those were recovered by the provider later when we switched and requested a smaller address space.
Wow, I hadn't run across that site. I'll have to try it out, and see how well they work. The only reason some of my sites are self-signed (non-public facing) is that I don't want to spend $20/yr on an interface I only see once every month or two. :) Still, a self-signed cert is better than plaintext.
But as we've seen proven, the CPU load isn't as big of an issue as is claimed.
The reports where people said it was, were from an awful long time ago, discussing high loads and CPUs that were measured in Mhz (i.e., Ghz CPUs weren't even imagined yet).
Right now, we have to look at a few issues.
1) Users are familiar with typing http:/// . If you went https only, without a redirection from http:/// you'd lose traffic. Simple fix, do a redirection.
2) Not everyone supports https still. If you include a piece from a 3rd party, you'll either get a broken lock, or the 3rd party data won't show.
3) Google Adsense doesn't support it. Still. And people have been asking for years. They are a major revenue source for a lot of sites.
4) Hosting https sites still require a unique IP for each site. If I, a a hosting provider, have 1000 sites on a server, I'd rather use one IP, than 1000 IPs.
5) SSL certs must be renewed. You must have the cooperation of the provider. Certs are no longer $100/yr, if you shop around a little. Trustico has provided perfectly functional certs for $20/yr for a long time (with discounts for multi-year purchases). I've been using them for several years. For a blog that has very cheap hosting, even the $20 doesn't necessarily make sense.
6) The time where there were huge compatibility issues with SSL implementations in browsers is gone, but you will still find the occasional app that doesn't have SSL compiled in by default, but that has become rare. At very least, all modern browsers support https:/// out of the box, regardless of where you are at.
The biggest issue is, users don't generally care. On my site, I have a warning every page if you're viewing insecure, and encouraging you to click the link to switch to the https version. Less than 10% of the users ever switch up to the https version. The only time I enforce it is when a users logs in. When they try to log in, it forces them to https, and keeps them there for the duration of their session.
Wow, lots of questions.. But thank you for asking.
Well, they have the plan, and they know where we're going. It's the unfortunately decision between "save everyone" and "save the ones you can". That's why we set gracious times to get to each waypoint. If one of the party is starting from elsewhere (say 1000 miles away), it would be up to them to figure out how to get there.
There are plenty of things that could happen from their initial starting point to the first waypoint where they meet everyone. Maybe they did not survive the initial disaster. Maybe they found another group who had a better plan. Maybe they make it across their front yard, and broke their ankle. Traveling in teams is ideal. If one person is injured to the point of not making the walk, others on the team could help. For the most part, the teams are families (blood relatives, significant others, etc), so there shouldn't be anyone traveling by themselves.
A blizzard or ice storm doesn't really qualify as an apocalyptic event. The snow will stop, utilities will be restored rapidly.
Well... Things happen. Me, being the good Alpha Male, would do my best to lead to "sanctuary" [flashbacks of Logan's Run], but I recognize the fact that the group may decide they want someone else in the group to lead, or they may split into another group. That's normal for our species.
Well, that's part of the survival supplies. If we cannot find a way to help them, they're still screwed regardless of where they go.
Well, as long as they're not screaming "hey, we're going to Utopia! Our friends know how to save us all!", it's kind of doubtful that too many people would just go following some complete strangers off to who knows where.
Generally, it's a good thing to have extra hands in your group. I by myself I can hopefully survive. As a sufficient size group, we have people who can farm, cook, rebuild whatever technology we can get our hands on (i.e., improvised hydroelectric power, plumbing, refrigeration, transportation).
Well, that's why it's
You'd have to also calculate in attrition. Stores come and go, it's just the way it is. So some open, some close, both legal and illegal.
There's no way for us to get the accurate numbers. It's not like China is exactly open about the happenings there, and definitely we couldn't get accurate numbers on illegal operations. Just like in the US, most of those numbers are swiftly extracted from the posterior orifice of a politician.
You know, I call my emergency plan "The Apocalypse Plan" or "The End of the World Plan"
The plan is distributed throughout my group of "survivors". Three meeting points, with the plan for the final destination are included.
Supplies include weapons and plenty of ammunition, food (MREs, water, water treatment, etc), clothing, personal supplies (toothpaste, toilet paper, feminine needs), medical supplies (basic first responder kit), and vehicle supplies (extra gas, spare parts, etc).
And of course, people ask "Why weapons?" Well, since this world is such a kind gentle place, it'd be perfectly safe walking or driving through a group of desperate people with enough supplies to live a few weeks on. Oh ya, you wouldn't be safe. Beyond that, you may (and likely will) need to use them for hunting when the food supplies run out.
If it is a prolonged period of civil unrest, you may find weapons your best friend. Well, I guess the best friend is the person who can use the weapons most efficiently.
The meeting points are staged along a predetermined evacuation route. Multiple routes are provided to each waypoint. Each waypoint was chosen for relative isolation, access to fresh water and wildlife, and access by car, large vehicle (bus/large truck) and aircraft. So you should be able to walk, drive, or fly there (there are a few licensed pilots in the group).
We all know the parties who should be able to arrive, so once the entire party has grouped at one of the waypoints (hopefully the first).
Distance to the waypoints and regrouping times (how long we wait) is based on at least double the walking time. If it takes an hour to drive, or a day to walk, we give 3 days. So waypoint 1 would be 3 days (E+3d). Waypoint 2 would be 2 weeks (E+17d). Waypoint 3 would be another 2 weeks (E+31d).
We plan to add shortwave radio to the plan. Right now, we only have one licensed operator. Not that licenses matter much in a state of emergency. When your region has just been leveled by a natural disaster, having the FAA show up to fine or arrest you would be welcome. "Fine, arrest me. Get me out of here."
Exactly.
The online currency in Second Life could be traded for real money, which didn't even involve a gray market. There was (is?) a legitimate exchange.
Between that, sales of virtual merchandise, virtual gambling and virtual prostitution, there was serious money to be made there.