Why? If the police can, in extreme situations, apply to a court for a warrant to search a suspect's house, open their mail or tap their phone - and the US and almost every other country allows this - why shouldn't they be able to search a suspect's computer? Personally I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the very idea of surreptitious searches. I cannot speak to German legal tradition, but I don't believe that such things were really ever envisioned as the kinds of "searches" and "seizures" mentioned in the Constitution here in the U.S.
If the police need to search someone's computer, and they have probable cause, I would much prefer they kick down the door with a SWAT team in the full light of day, confiscate everything, and then disassemble it forensically, than use trojan horse programs. Although on the surface it might seem that kicking down the door is a lot more severe, I think it's less prone to abuse by virtue of its severity. I would rather force the police to take the more severe, heavyhanded approach, than give the authorities a way of spying on citizens that's not obvious.
To be blunt, I don't trust the "authorities" enough to give them the powers to conduct surreptitious surveillance. Sadly, it may be too late to take them back.
A major ISP in the city I resided in in Romania help alleviate demands on bandwidth to and from the outside world by just setting up a DC++ server for their customers where they could share music and movies with other people in the same city. Seems easier to do than trying to ban all manner of P2P traffic. Too bad that sort of thing would never fly in the U.S. Yeah, that would never fly in the U.S., sadly, but I wonder if there are types of caching systems that would work, if they operated on the lower network levels and didn't care what type of traffic they were caching.
Maybe you could put together some system that was more general than HTTP caching proxies like Squid, that analyzed outgoing requests on all ports and protocols and the subsequent responses, and cached both. If you got multiple requests going out for the same piece of content, it could intercept and swap in the cached content. (I wonder what kind of stuff this might break...)
Just seems like perhaps there's some way to create a general "network cache" that would be protocol-agnostic, and would let a university or other organization reduce the bandwidth demands of P2P, porn, and other services that they can't be seen as supporting, while preserving their plausible deniability.
Possible, but that's not trivial. In fact, it can be quite hard to tell an encrypted bitstream from a heavily compressed one of some unknown format (say, the Flash video codec-of-the-week). It wouldn't be hard to take encrypted data and encapsulate it in some other format, making it appear to casual inspection to be streaming video or VoIP or something else entirely.
They could make life on ports 22 and 443 and using conventional protocols like HTTPS and SSH really obnoxious, but you can't just ban all encrypted content, at least not easily and at very high speeds.
Sadly here in America we like to play a Minesweeper-ish game with our bandwidth limits. It's out there somewhere, but you don't know quite where it is. So all you can do is download more and more, until eventually you hit it and get throttled or disconnected. Boom -- game over.
Even within a particular company there's no consistency; some people have been bumped or throttled by Comcast at 80GB/mo, but other people can do twice that forever and don't get into trouble. It's all based on factors that you as the consumer have no access or insight into, except perhaps indirectly (are you the only person in your neighborhood to have cable internet?).
They should get their gig of porn, too. In fact, gigs of porn all around.
Or at least to whomever's ISPs promised them service. That's the real problem here, the overselling of backhaul capacity and quoting of mindless 'burst' speeds rather than average or continuous transfer. What everyone is doing with their connection is irrelevant. If I'm downloading porn or watching YouTube, the effect on my neighbors is going to be basically the same (witness most recent 'imminent death of the net' story, which IIRC blamed video).
We need a little more truth in advertising in internet access. Let's make them advertise two separate figures, one for speed and one for transfer, for starters. And if they're going to do QoS or prioritize traffic, that needs to be disclosed, too -- not just that they're going to do it, but on what basis they're going to do the QoS and a breakdown of what traffic is going to get what priority over what else.
Yeah, and you'd better want to reread the books you buy, because unlike real ones, you can't resell these down at the local shop for new ones.
Personally I think the price-point is way high. They have virtually zero marginal cost on these, plus they can't be resold (meaning you need to subtract the resale value from the price you'd be willing to pay for the exact same product otherwise), or even loaned to a friend or shared.
It's a step in the right direction but Amazon still seems to be trying to have it both ways: they're basing their price on real physical books (admittedly at a discount, but they're still taking the dead-tree price and working down, not taking the actual marginal cost and working up), but then restricting your use of them in ways that are only possible because they're digital. Pretty raw deal for the consumer, IMO.
Most of the free content available (the legit stuff; the bootleg ebooks on P2P nonwithstanding), including most of Project Gutenberg's collection, are just straight ASCII text, they're not PDFs. This makes them pretty obnoxious to read unless you have a display device that can be taught how to do on-the-fly reformatting.
(It's not like it would be terribly hard; really all you need is to display it in a nice, hinted serif font, then do some basic word/line spacing. It's certainly a lot easier than writing a HTML rendering engine, and that seems to be standard for most of these devices. The OSS method would probably be to use a modified version of the TeX engine, but that would be overkill.)
Just because a format is legible doesn't mean it's pleasant to read hundreds of pages in it. A seven-year-old, writing in crayon, is readable. But I wouldn't want to read Tolstoy in crayon-scrawl, any more than I'd want to read it in fixed-width ASCII on a low-res display.
And just as an aside: I'm aware of the reason why PG uses straight ASCII as its format of choice, and I think it makes sense from a certain bomb-shelter / preserving-civilization-against-infocalypse perspective. But that doesn't mean it's a nice format for everyday reading, and I'm glad that some of the newer stuff seems to be coming in alternative formats. There's still a vast catalog that's ASCII-only, though, and any good ebook reader should have some way of pleasantly displaying such content.
In some urban areas it's not uncommon to have somebody (frequently a homeless person but sometimes not) go through the trash every night looking for things of value, e.g. refundable bottles. I've no idea whether they're savvy enough to recognize and pull out a hard drive as potentially valuable, or desperate enough to open a bag of cat turds looking for stuff, but it's not a chance I'd really like to take. (Also, some garbage may go to a recycling center for sorting before it goes to a landfill or incinerator, so there may be multiple points where someone could pull the drive out of the waste stream.)
I bore a bunch of holes through any of the ones I toss out, just to make it obvious they're not salvageable.
Not totally true. I've actually priced manufactured houses on a per-sqft basis for similar sizes, compared to conventional homes, and they still work out to be a lot cheaper even at 4 and 5 bedrooms. And you'd be surprised what they can do with "manufactured" (sometimes "modular") houses: they have what are basically prebuilt McMansions, cut into pieces and ready to drop onto your concrete pad or foundation, if you shop around. (They actually remind me a lot of how modern ships and submarines are built.) There are even places that can do one-off and custom designs with suitable lead time.
When you get down to it, it's a much more efficient method of construction than site-building, but there's a pretty serious social stigma in some circles against having your house hauled to the site on the back of a trailer in Saran-wrapped chunks and dropped there with a crane.
Ultimately I suppose "small" is subjective but there are manufactured-modular houses that get into the 2000-3000+ sq ft range, which is definitely big by my standards.
Can you replace it with something else? My guess is no, though what if its a card from the same manufacter? From what I understand, sometimes you can get cards from the same manufacturer that will read them, but sometimes they change the disk formatting between card versions or models and you're stuck. I know some people who have some older PATA hardware RAID cards that they use in JBOD mode and then software RAID on top of, for this reason; if the card ever failed, they don't want to be unable to get to the data.
To me, hardware RAID was something that seemed a lot more attractive back 6-10 years ago when offloading the work from the machine's main processor was a much bigger deal than it is today. With a 1GHz+ machine at your disposal, I can't imagine the performance advantage of HW RAID is really all that great anymore, and it seems like you're buying that speed at the cost of a lot of flexibility.
As long as the software you're using to do the RAID is freely and widely available, and has a good userbase (so that it'll be supported into the future and won't become abandonware), that just seems like a much safer way to go.
they developed the IP in question Bull. They just patented something that apparently everyone else thought was too basic, stupid, or obvious to try and patent. They're practically the definition of a patent troll.
You couldn't design a video-over-IP system without infringing on the Burst patent, even if you had no idea who Burst was.
That said, Burst is nothing but a bunch of scoundrels, but I can't really fault them for playing the system to its full extent; if they hadn't done it, somebody else would have. The real shame is on the patent system in general and the USPTO in particular for letting this remain de rigueur for so long.
"Current incarnations lack the resolution of a cheap laser printer..."
Heh so's your monitor. But that's despite the point: It's 150 DPI, that's definitely more than adequate for reading. Maybe you think so, but I don't find it particularly pleasant. I think this is fairly common, too; I know quite a few people who print off anything longer than a few pages because they detest reading on-screen so much.
An e-book can probably get away with a lower resolution than commercial or laser printing achieves through the use of anti-aliasing, but I think you're mistaken if you think most people can't tell the difference between 150 dpi and 1500 dpi offset, and won't immediately pick the high-dpi one as more pleasant to read (even if they can't identify the resolution as the cause for the pleasantness).
"I wouldn't ever want to have to read a book from a monitor" is one of the objections I've heard over and over regarding e-books, and I think the low resolution of most computer displays is a big contributor to that.
The e-paper is definitely neat (well, needs more resolution; the low res of computer displays is one of the main reasons why so many people prefer printing documents out, but it's a good start). Also, I think Amazon is in a better position than just about anyone else to succeed on the content side, since they actually have access to a lot of print material, unlike other reader manufacturers.
Unfortunately, that they tie downloaded content to the device you purchased it on makes it a lot less attractive to me, and the price for digital content is still very high. If they want to simulate paper, they need to let people use it like paper; they can't try to cut it both ways, by charging a significant fraction of the paper-book price but then DRM it and not let you loan content to your friends like you would with a regular book. If the content is going to be locked to the reader, it has to be a whole lot cheaper before they get me interested (and I think I'm probably pretty close to the target market), since it's not like you can go down to the local library and load this thing up.
Every email to the device costs $0.10; it's not free. (You can transfer documents for free to it via USB, I think, but this is a whole lot less convenient.)
Also, keep in mind that when they say "lifetime free access to Wikipedia," they don't really mean your lifetime, or even their lifetime, but merely the lifetime of their business model. If at some point down the road these things stop making money for them, that cell connection is going to stop working, too. (And given the short lifespans of cell technologies, I wouldn't expect this thing to work with the cell network for more than a few years, a decade at most, before Sprint forces an upgrade to some new system. I have piles of old handsets sitting around my house as a testament to these forced upgrades that they push through every so often.)
I think this thing is interesting, and it's the best effort at e-books so far, but it's still really, really bleeding edge. Personally I just can't justify shelling out four bills to be what seems suspiciously like a public beta.
To clarify: With plug-in security I meant the idea that you can just put a box in your network path or install a software and be secure from having your identity revealed. I wasn't talking about the kind of security which keeps your system clean or your data private. Okay, but I think a better term might be "plug-in anonymity," since what Tor offers isn't really 'security' in general. It's a very specific kind of security, perhaps, but it's not a security solution generally.
And I think given that definition, Tor does pretty well -- it *is* basically a drop-in solution if what you really need is just anonymity. Of course, it doesn't stop you from giving away the store in some way that doesn't use your IP address, but no system can.
Also, you can listen A LOT of music for free on myspace for example. Why not just go there, if you want this stuff for free? I don't know about anyone else, but I'd pay $12-15 to not have to go to MySpace to get my music...
The idea of data center plus power plus cooling in a package is definitely attractive for many applications. Rig the thing in Mountain view, send it off to Niagra Falls or some other place with real cheap power to operate it. Rig it in Mountain View? Try Hong Kong. Or maybe Wuhan (where Foxconn has its megafactories). The cost to ship a container from California to New York is a substantial fraction of what it costs to ship it from China to NY; most of the cost is in the "last 500 miles" -- the leg of the trip by truck from the nearest big intermodal facility. Plus, most of the servers, cabling, and other stuff going into the container is made in the Far East anyway, so it would make sense to assemble the thing there, rather than boxing up all the servers, putting them in a container, shipping it to the U.S., only to unbox them and put them into a different container. (In other words: you're already paying for China-US shipping of the servers anyway.)
I think the short answer is that you don't. I've seen the photos of Sun's boxes, and while the racks do pull out to let you get to the equipment if you need to, I think you basically just view each server in the rack as a small part of a bigger assembly (the box itself), and if something goes faulty in a single server, you move its workload to another machine and just turn it off and leave it there, essentially entombed in the rack. Maybe they'll be some way of easily swapping out machines, or maybe it'll just be easier to leave them there until the entire container's worth of machines are obsolete, and then just dispose of the whole thing and get a new box hauled in. (Or send it back to somewhere for refurbishment, where they can strip it down completely, pull out all the machines, repair and replace, and then bring in a new one.)
We think of rack space as being precious because of the way traditional datacenters are built and designed; I'm not sure that would still be true if you had a warehouse or parking lot full of crates (especially if they're stacked 3 or 4 high) instead. If you never unseal the box, rack space isn't a concern. Heck, if you have a football field of stacked containers, you might not even want to mess around with getting a dead one out of a stack if it died completely. Just leave it there until you have some major maintenance scheduled and it's convenient to remove it.
This is getting into business models rather than the technology itself, but I could imagine a company selling or leasing boxes with a certain number of actual processing nodes and a number of hot spares, and a contract to replace the container if more than x number of nodes failed during the box's service life (5 years or so). Companies could buy them, plug them in, and basically forget about them, like the old stories about IBM mainframes. If enough units in the box failed so that it was close to running out of hot spares, then it could phone home for a replacement. As long as enough hot spares were provided so that you didn't need to do this often, it might be fairly economical.
Rule #1 in technology, anything portable is more expensive than if it were not portable. If its so cheap to use a crate, why not just put the stuff in the crate in a warehouse instead, bypassing the crate and all of the work and design involved with shoving and fitting the stuff in the crate? Not really applicable here. The equipment is the same either way. It's not like buying a laptop versus a desktop, where one is carefully (and expensively) optimized and the other one isn't. The same pizzaboxes/blades are going in the racks either way, whether it's in a traditional datacenter or in a cargo container.
The advantage is more on the installation and infrastructure end. Think of it more as "mobile homes" versus "traditional houses." With a regular house, you have to get the plumber, electrician, HVAC guy, carpenters, etc. to your site. For a mobile home or trailer, you keep all those people in one place, and they build houses over and over and over, on an assembly line. And as a result, "manufactured homes" are a lot cheaper than regular ones.
I think that's the model that you want to apply to datacenters: get rid of all the on-site installation and configuration, all the raised flooring and cabling; just have a team of people in a factory somewhere, installing and wiring all the servers into the containers, over and over. Then you just haul the container to the customer's site and plug it in. (In fact, since it's in a shipping container already, there's no reason why you do this in a place where labor is expensive; you might as well assemble them in some third-world country somewhere; it would almost assuredly be worth the small cost for sea freight -- most of a container's transportation costs are in the last few hundred miles anyway.)
The problem is mainly a chicken-and-egg one; in order to make "datacenters in a box" cheaper than traditional ones, you need to get an economy of scale going. You need to have an assembly line churning them out. If you don't have that, you're just taking the expense of a traditional data center and then adding a bunch of containerization and transportation costs to it.
It might take a very long time to catch on, because there's such an investment in traditional datacenters right now, but if I worked doing datacenter server installations, it's probably something I'd be a little concerned about. Unlike with 'manufactured homes' and regular houses, there isn't much social stigma over having your web site served from a trailer.
Re:Conclusion:
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Spying On Tor
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· Score: 5, Informative
Tor is so easy to abuse (if you run a tor server) it's not even funny. Just take a look at the code, it's trivial to hack. It's funny how much of the OSS community are proverbial sheeple, believing that since it's open source, it must be secure. I know I'm feeding a troll here, but I think this is an opportunity to clarify a point: Tor does one thing, and does it pretty well. It hides your IP address from the server you're connecting to. That's it.
It's not a "plug in security" solution, and it's not meant to protect your traffic from people snooping on it in transit. If you want that, you need to use some sort of end-to-end encryption on top of Tor. (And you need to use some form of encryption that doesn't positively identify you, or else you might as well not use Tor to begin with.)
These kind of "attacks" are trivial because they have nothing to do with Tor's actual function. They're taking advantage of user stupidity, not a design flaw.
The issue with leap seconds is unsolvable by switching to decimal time because an Earth Year is not an even number of Earth Days. We have Leap Year with an extra day every four years because the revolution takes 365 1/4 days. The leap second is just an extension of that, because the year isn't exactly 365 1/4 days either, there's more error that needs to be corrected for. No, that's not the source of the leap-second problem. The 1/4 day issue is solved by the addition of a "leap day" every four years, and it's really an issue for people writing calendars.
The leap-second issue springs from the definition of a second. We think of a second as being 1/86,400th of a day (24*60*60), but in reality it's defined as a certain number of vibrations of a cesium atom. When the standard was developed, the number of atomic vibrations -- the length of the second -- was chosen to be 1/86,400th of an average day, but it immediately began to diverge because the length of a day here on Earth is very slowly getting longer.
To keep "clock time" synchronized with "astronomical time" you need to do one of two things: either you need to constantly redefine the 'second' to keep it equal to exactly 1/86,400th of an Earth day, OR you need to periodically insert "leap seconds" into the clocks, to make up for the deviation. Because of the problems inherent in constantly redefining an SI base unit, the second approach has been taken. Whenever UTC (which is kept by atomic clocks) deviates from UT1 (astronomically observed time) by more than 0.9s, a leap second is inserted in UTC to bring it back in sync. I think this is done about once every six months, although it will be need to be done more and more often as the Earth continues to slow. (Eventually, in a few centuries, we'd get to the point where we'd need to insert a leap second every day, because an actual day would be 86,401 SI seconds.)
Personally I think the current compromise is pretty decent: UT1 for people who want real astronomical time, TAI for people who want absolute time, and UTC for the rest of us, who want the convenience of SI seconds while also remaining no more than a second removed from astronomical time.
I don't really understand why it's necessary to change UTC to basically turn it into TAI, when TAI is already there for those who want to use it.
And when Virginia makes the same tax grab? Its not like anyone to want to leave money on the table - not with deficits climbing.
Not going to happen in VA. The state is a lot more conservative and anti-tax than VA, and many more big software companies have big presences there, particularly in northern VA. (Although most of the development business is all public-sector stuff, where the client is the Federal government and would be exempt anyway.)
I would expect to see much higher real- and personal-property taxes, and maybe personal and corporate income taxes, before you see a tax on services in VA. The politicians are stupid, but they generally know not to shit where they eat, and messing with the consulting or software industries would definitely qualify as taking a dump in the trough.
That's not really the point; the problem here is that Maryland has decided to single out software development for taxation, separate from virtually all other services. Why, exactly, should software development be taxed, when house painting or hair cutting isn't?
All they're doing is making IT services more expensive and consequently less available to businesses in Maryland. That, in the long run, just makes them less competitive.
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If the police need to search someone's computer, and they have probable cause, I would much prefer they kick down the door with a SWAT team in the full light of day, confiscate everything, and then disassemble it forensically, than use trojan horse programs. Although on the surface it might seem that kicking down the door is a lot more severe, I think it's less prone to abuse by virtue of its severity. I would rather force the police to take the more severe, heavyhanded approach, than give the authorities a way of spying on citizens that's not obvious.
To be blunt, I don't trust the "authorities" enough to give them the powers to conduct surreptitious surveillance. Sadly, it may be too late to take them back.
Maybe you could put together some system that was more general than HTTP caching proxies like Squid, that analyzed outgoing requests on all ports and protocols and the subsequent responses, and cached both. If you got multiple requests going out for the same piece of content, it could intercept and swap in the cached content. (I wonder what kind of stuff this might break...)
Just seems like perhaps there's some way to create a general "network cache" that would be protocol-agnostic, and would let a university or other organization reduce the bandwidth demands of P2P, porn, and other services that they can't be seen as supporting, while preserving their plausible deniability.
Are we allowed ICMP ping, so we can tell how fast it is?
Nothing else, just ping.
There's part of me that would pay for that.
Possible, but that's not trivial. In fact, it can be quite hard to tell an encrypted bitstream from a heavily compressed one of some unknown format (say, the Flash video codec-of-the-week). It wouldn't be hard to take encrypted data and encapsulate it in some other format, making it appear to casual inspection to be streaming video or VoIP or something else entirely.
They could make life on ports 22 and 443 and using conventional protocols like HTTPS and SSH really obnoxious, but you can't just ban all encrypted content, at least not easily and at very high speeds.
Sadly here in America we like to play a Minesweeper-ish game with our bandwidth limits. It's out there somewhere, but you don't know quite where it is. So all you can do is download more and more, until eventually you hit it and get throttled or disconnected. Boom -- game over.
Even within a particular company there's no consistency; some people have been bumped or throttled by Comcast at 80GB/mo, but other people can do twice that forever and don't get into trouble. It's all based on factors that you as the consumer have no access or insight into, except perhaps indirectly (are you the only person in your neighborhood to have cable internet?).
They should get their gig of porn, too. In fact, gigs of porn all around.
Or at least to whomever's ISPs promised them service. That's the real problem here, the overselling of backhaul capacity and quoting of mindless 'burst' speeds rather than average or continuous transfer. What everyone is doing with their connection is irrelevant. If I'm downloading porn or watching YouTube, the effect on my neighbors is going to be basically the same (witness most recent 'imminent death of the net' story, which IIRC blamed video).
We need a little more truth in advertising in internet access. Let's make them advertise two separate figures, one for speed and one for transfer, for starters. And if they're going to do QoS or prioritize traffic, that needs to be disclosed, too -- not just that they're going to do it, but on what basis they're going to do the QoS and a breakdown of what traffic is going to get what priority over what else.
Yeah, and you'd better want to reread the books you buy, because unlike real ones, you can't resell these down at the local shop for new ones.
Personally I think the price-point is way high. They have virtually zero marginal cost on these, plus they can't be resold (meaning you need to subtract the resale value from the price you'd be willing to pay for the exact same product otherwise), or even loaned to a friend or shared.
It's a step in the right direction but Amazon still seems to be trying to have it both ways: they're basing their price on real physical books (admittedly at a discount, but they're still taking the dead-tree price and working down, not taking the actual marginal cost and working up), but then restricting your use of them in ways that are only possible because they're digital. Pretty raw deal for the consumer, IMO.
I don't think that's what he's getting at.
Most of the free content available (the legit stuff; the bootleg ebooks on P2P nonwithstanding), including most of Project Gutenberg's collection, are just straight ASCII text, they're not PDFs. This makes them pretty obnoxious to read unless you have a display device that can be taught how to do on-the-fly reformatting.
(It's not like it would be terribly hard; really all you need is to display it in a nice, hinted serif font, then do some basic word/line spacing. It's certainly a lot easier than writing a HTML rendering engine, and that seems to be standard for most of these devices. The OSS method would probably be to use a modified version of the TeX engine, but that would be overkill.)
Just because a format is legible doesn't mean it's pleasant to read hundreds of pages in it. A seven-year-old, writing in crayon, is readable. But I wouldn't want to read Tolstoy in crayon-scrawl, any more than I'd want to read it in fixed-width ASCII on a low-res display.
And just as an aside: I'm aware of the reason why PG uses straight ASCII as its format of choice, and I think it makes sense from a certain bomb-shelter / preserving-civilization-against-infocalypse perspective. But that doesn't mean it's a nice format for everyday reading, and I'm glad that some of the newer stuff seems to be coming in alternative formats. There's still a vast catalog that's ASCII-only, though, and any good ebook reader should have some way of pleasantly displaying such content.
Depends on where you live.
In some urban areas it's not uncommon to have somebody (frequently a homeless person but sometimes not) go through the trash every night looking for things of value, e.g. refundable bottles. I've no idea whether they're savvy enough to recognize and pull out a hard drive as potentially valuable, or desperate enough to open a bag of cat turds looking for stuff, but it's not a chance I'd really like to take. (Also, some garbage may go to a recycling center for sorting before it goes to a landfill or incinerator, so there may be multiple points where someone could pull the drive out of the waste stream.)
I bore a bunch of holes through any of the ones I toss out, just to make it obvious they're not salvageable.
Not totally true. I've actually priced manufactured houses on a per-sqft basis for similar sizes, compared to conventional homes, and they still work out to be a lot cheaper even at 4 and 5 bedrooms. And you'd be surprised what they can do with "manufactured" (sometimes "modular") houses: they have what are basically prebuilt McMansions, cut into pieces and ready to drop onto your concrete pad or foundation, if you shop around. (They actually remind me a lot of how modern ships and submarines are built.) There are even places that can do one-off and custom designs with suitable lead time.
When you get down to it, it's a much more efficient method of construction than site-building, but there's a pretty serious social stigma in some circles against having your house hauled to the site on the back of a trailer in Saran-wrapped chunks and dropped there with a crane.
Ultimately I suppose "small" is subjective but there are manufactured-modular houses that get into the 2000-3000+ sq ft range, which is definitely big by my standards.
To me, hardware RAID was something that seemed a lot more attractive back 6-10 years ago when offloading the work from the machine's main processor was a much bigger deal than it is today. With a 1GHz+ machine at your disposal, I can't imagine the performance advantage of HW RAID is really all that great anymore, and it seems like you're buying that speed at the cost of a lot of flexibility.
As long as the software you're using to do the RAID is freely and widely available, and has a good userbase (so that it'll be supported into the future and won't become abandonware), that just seems like a much safer way to go.
You couldn't design a video-over-IP system without infringing on the Burst patent, even if you had no idea who Burst was.
That said, Burst is nothing but a bunch of scoundrels, but I can't really fault them for playing the system to its full extent; if they hadn't done it, somebody else would have. The real shame is on the patent system in general and the USPTO in particular for letting this remain de rigueur for so long.
Heh so's your monitor. But that's despite the point: It's 150 DPI, that's definitely more than adequate for reading. Maybe you think so, but I don't find it particularly pleasant. I think this is fairly common, too; I know quite a few people who print off anything longer than a few pages because they detest reading on-screen so much.
An e-book can probably get away with a lower resolution than commercial or laser printing achieves through the use of anti-aliasing, but I think you're mistaken if you think most people can't tell the difference between 150 dpi and 1500 dpi offset, and won't immediately pick the high-dpi one as more pleasant to read (even if they can't identify the resolution as the cause for the pleasantness).
"I wouldn't ever want to have to read a book from a monitor" is one of the objections I've heard over and over regarding e-books, and I think the low resolution of most computer displays is a big contributor to that.
The e-paper is definitely neat (well, needs more resolution; the low res of computer displays is one of the main reasons why so many people prefer printing documents out, but it's a good start). Also, I think Amazon is in a better position than just about anyone else to succeed on the content side, since they actually have access to a lot of print material, unlike other reader manufacturers.
Unfortunately, that they tie downloaded content to the device you purchased it on makes it a lot less attractive to me, and the price for digital content is still very high. If they want to simulate paper, they need to let people use it like paper; they can't try to cut it both ways, by charging a significant fraction of the paper-book price but then DRM it and not let you loan content to your friends like you would with a regular book. If the content is going to be locked to the reader, it has to be a whole lot cheaper before they get me interested (and I think I'm probably pretty close to the target market), since it's not like you can go down to the local library and load this thing up.
Every email to the device costs $0.10; it's not free. (You can transfer documents for free to it via USB, I think, but this is a whole lot less convenient.)
Also, keep in mind that when they say "lifetime free access to Wikipedia," they don't really mean your lifetime, or even their lifetime, but merely the lifetime of their business model. If at some point down the road these things stop making money for them, that cell connection is going to stop working, too. (And given the short lifespans of cell technologies, I wouldn't expect this thing to work with the cell network for more than a few years, a decade at most, before Sprint forces an upgrade to some new system. I have piles of old handsets sitting around my house as a testament to these forced upgrades that they push through every so often.)
I think this thing is interesting, and it's the best effort at e-books so far, but it's still really, really bleeding edge. Personally I just can't justify shelling out four bills to be what seems suspiciously like a public beta.
And I think given that definition, Tor does pretty well -- it *is* basically a drop-in solution if what you really need is just anonymity. Of course, it doesn't stop you from giving away the store in some way that doesn't use your IP address, but no system can.
I think the short answer is that you don't. I've seen the photos of Sun's boxes, and while the racks do pull out to let you get to the equipment if you need to, I think you basically just view each server in the rack as a small part of a bigger assembly (the box itself), and if something goes faulty in a single server, you move its workload to another machine and just turn it off and leave it there, essentially entombed in the rack. Maybe they'll be some way of easily swapping out machines, or maybe it'll just be easier to leave them there until the entire container's worth of machines are obsolete, and then just dispose of the whole thing and get a new box hauled in. (Or send it back to somewhere for refurbishment, where they can strip it down completely, pull out all the machines, repair and replace, and then bring in a new one.)
We think of rack space as being precious because of the way traditional datacenters are built and designed; I'm not sure that would still be true if you had a warehouse or parking lot full of crates (especially if they're stacked 3 or 4 high) instead. If you never unseal the box, rack space isn't a concern. Heck, if you have a football field of stacked containers, you might not even want to mess around with getting a dead one out of a stack if it died completely. Just leave it there until you have some major maintenance scheduled and it's convenient to remove it.
This is getting into business models rather than the technology itself, but I could imagine a company selling or leasing boxes with a certain number of actual processing nodes and a number of hot spares, and a contract to replace the container if more than x number of nodes failed during the box's service life (5 years or so). Companies could buy them, plug them in, and basically forget about them, like the old stories about IBM mainframes. If enough units in the box failed so that it was close to running out of hot spares, then it could phone home for a replacement. As long as enough hot spares were provided so that you didn't need to do this often, it might be fairly economical.
The advantage is more on the installation and infrastructure end. Think of it more as "mobile homes" versus "traditional houses." With a regular house, you have to get the plumber, electrician, HVAC guy, carpenters, etc. to your site. For a mobile home or trailer, you keep all those people in one place, and they build houses over and over and over, on an assembly line. And as a result, "manufactured homes" are a lot cheaper than regular ones.
I think that's the model that you want to apply to datacenters: get rid of all the on-site installation and configuration, all the raised flooring and cabling; just have a team of people in a factory somewhere, installing and wiring all the servers into the containers, over and over. Then you just haul the container to the customer's site and plug it in. (In fact, since it's in a shipping container already, there's no reason why you do this in a place where labor is expensive; you might as well assemble them in some third-world country somewhere; it would almost assuredly be worth the small cost for sea freight -- most of a container's transportation costs are in the last few hundred miles anyway.)
The problem is mainly a chicken-and-egg one; in order to make "datacenters in a box" cheaper than traditional ones, you need to get an economy of scale going. You need to have an assembly line churning them out. If you don't have that, you're just taking the expense of a traditional data center and then adding a bunch of containerization and transportation costs to it.
It might take a very long time to catch on, because there's such an investment in traditional datacenters right now, but if I worked doing datacenter server installations, it's probably something I'd be a little concerned about. Unlike with 'manufactured homes' and regular houses, there isn't much social stigma over having your web site served from a trailer.
It's not a "plug in security" solution, and it's not meant to protect your traffic from people snooping on it in transit. If you want that, you need to use some sort of end-to-end encryption on top of Tor. (And you need to use some form of encryption that doesn't positively identify you, or else you might as well not use Tor to begin with.)
These kind of "attacks" are trivial because they have nothing to do with Tor's actual function. They're taking advantage of user stupidity, not a design flaw.
The leap-second issue springs from the definition of a second. We think of a second as being 1/86,400th of a day (24*60*60), but in reality it's defined as a certain number of vibrations of a cesium atom. When the standard was developed, the number of atomic vibrations -- the length of the second -- was chosen to be 1/86,400th of an average day, but it immediately began to diverge because the length of a day here on Earth is very slowly getting longer.
To keep "clock time" synchronized with "astronomical time" you need to do one of two things: either you need to constantly redefine the 'second' to keep it equal to exactly 1/86,400th of an Earth day, OR you need to periodically insert "leap seconds" into the clocks, to make up for the deviation. Because of the problems inherent in constantly redefining an SI base unit, the second approach has been taken. Whenever UTC (which is kept by atomic clocks) deviates from UT1 (astronomically observed time) by more than 0.9s, a leap second is inserted in UTC to bring it back in sync. I think this is done about once every six months, although it will be need to be done more and more often as the Earth continues to slow. (Eventually, in a few centuries, we'd get to the point where we'd need to insert a leap second every day, because an actual day would be 86,401 SI seconds.)
Personally I think the current compromise is pretty decent: UT1 for people who want real astronomical time, TAI for people who want absolute time, and UTC for the rest of us, who want the convenience of SI seconds while also remaining no more than a second removed from astronomical time.
I don't really understand why it's necessary to change UTC to basically turn it into TAI, when TAI is already there for those who want to use it.
The state is a lot more conservative and anti-tax than VA,
...
The state is a lot more conservative and anti-tax than MD,
And when Virginia makes the same tax grab? Its not like anyone to want to leave money on the table - not with deficits climbing.
Not going to happen in VA. The state is a lot more conservative and anti-tax than VA, and many more big software companies have big presences there, particularly in northern VA. (Although most of the development business is all public-sector stuff, where the client is the Federal government and would be exempt anyway.)I would expect to see much higher real- and personal-property taxes, and maybe personal and corporate income taxes, before you see a tax on services in VA. The politicians are stupid, but they generally know not to shit where they eat, and messing with the consulting or software industries would definitely qualify as taking a dump in the trough.
That's not really the point; the problem here is that Maryland has decided to single out software development for taxation, separate from virtually all other services. Why, exactly, should software development be taxed, when house painting or hair cutting isn't?
All they're doing is making IT services more expensive and consequently less available to businesses in Maryland. That, in the long run, just makes them less competitive.