It seems to me that TCP/IP is not the proper protocol for this, something like DTN is far better suited for his connectivity situation, especially since you could theoretically get an international phone service and have most bulk data sent only when you get close enough to port to relay through cell phone services. He could even write up an Email convergence layer if he wanted and theoretically get around the online time limitations (even if, as I suspect, email is only sent in big batches at non-peak times). The downside is that this depends greatly on how the online access is structured in the ship, and doing something like this would be somewhere between difficult and near impossible.
Assuming you like paying $4/minute for coverage (assuming you can find some amazing cut-rate airtime broker). And when jstockdale says "old-school dialup", he doesn't mean "like having to use a modem instead of DSL", he means "you're not going to get the 2400 baud this thing advertises".
Anybody who has worked on driver code can tell you that most hardware vendors ship an errata with their chip. Some hardware has rather significant erratas, like the SiI 3112 SATA controller that got installed in pretty much every SATA compatible motherboard back before SATA support was properly integrated into Southbridges. The CMD 640 is another example of a chip with an extensive hardware errata.
It doesn't help that most programming languages are lousy at validating input. C is especially bad as it has poor pattern matching capabilities by default and no dynamically sized structures. Worse, it offers absolutely no heap checking capabilities meaning at the end of the day your function is forced to trust the input instead of verifying it for itself. You can use fgets() with a buffer size listed, but if that passed buffer size is wrong for whatever reason there is no way in the language for fgets() or anything else to safely handle or even detect it.
That said, it's not impossible to write safe C code. In fact it's not even all that difficult, but it does mean that even small otherwise unrelated errors in your code can be surprising security problems.
What if by not cleaning it the virus installs a boatload of malware that effectively disables the computers and leaks confidential patient data to all manner of criminal networks? Would you want to be the person who didn't press the enter key in that situation?
Well, if your ISP supports IPv6 you won't even need to run something like dhclient, autoconfiguration is built right into the protocol. You'll just suddenly have an address when you connect. Downside: your ISP does not support IPv6.
The other option is to set up an IPv6 tunnel on top of IPv4, which is complicated (especially if your IP is dynamic, which it is) and means you get to send all of your data through some node somewhere before it goes out to the internet at large (adding hops). Basically it's a fair bit of work to get you access to the same internet you already have access to, only slower.
Or is that list of ipv6 capable ISPs depressingly short? All I see on there are a handful of tiny mom and pop shops and perhaps some larger foreign ISPs. Until Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, NTT, Telekom, or any other major ISPs start showing up on that list all of this IPv6 stuff is going to remain a research toy. I would use IPv6 now if my ISP supported it. I'm not really interested in setting up a complicated tunnel for effectively no benefit. That IPv6 porn site never even got off of the ground.
I remember when this came out. I thought to myself "I'll sign up when I run into a website that needs it." Except for this article, that was the last I'd ever heard of it. I'm amazed it is still around.
Google was just trying to save money
on
Google Router Rumors
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It seems likely to me that since Google is full of really smart people who seem to have a touch of the NIH syndrome, it probably isn't surprising that they wanted to develop their own routers from scratch instead of paying through the nose for Cisco or Juniper devices, especially since they needed hundreds or thousands of them and really don't want to have to pay for support contracts. I'd see a Google router announcement as just a productization of something they already use internally, just like Protocol Buffers.
The problem is that Google develops tech internally that is extremely good at solving their problems, but they don't always apply well outside of Google. Protocol Buffers aren't exactly obsoleting XML and from all indications they probably never will. The Google router will probably be super fast and simple, but lack a whole bunch of the more obscure features. The problem is that there's someone out there for each one of those obscure features, and if you don't support it your product won't even make it in the door. This is a problem Juniper runs into a lot, they have good and fast hardware, but the only thing it does is route.
In fact the article points out that Google's router is most likely to compete directly with Juniper instead of Cisco.
Actually, big areas of the country are tone dialing only. Usually entire regions are switched over as part of an equipment upgrade. When this happens, the phone company basically calls everybody who is still sending pulses down the line and tells them that in 1 month or whatever their old pulse phones won't work anymore. They typically offer to upgrade any archaic pulse-only phones for free when this happens.
Given that this switchover was hitting even semi-rural areas like Bluefield, WV several years ago, I'd bet that your average American Slashdotter would discover that switching their phone to "pulse" would prevent it from successfully dialing.
It won't be sold as "collision proof", but it will be rebranded as "automated braking assist" or something like that. Then, like you said it will start trickling through the available car lines starting with the luxury models first and eventually maybe even making it down to the economy models. I don't think the liability issue will be a big one, cars already have similar technologies like adaptive cruise control that in my mind would be more risky than this and the liability issue hasn't (AFAIK) come up yet.
There was another story where a GP hull collided with a neutron star. The hull was fine, but the contents of the hull were smashed down into a mass about the size of an atom and plastered on the inside front of the hull.
The thing I hated about RA3 was that it was designed for co-op online play, which was fine (I had a friend I wanted to play through it with), but then they are still using the same networking code they used for the original C&C. If you don't have a direct connection to the internet or one of what seems like 3 piece of crap "home routers" that they support, good luck getting an online game set up. The tech support consists of "it should just automagically work, if it doesn't try running this Ultima Online tester and see what it says...".
I never once got an online game of it successfully started, even after directly connecting to the internet and turning off the firewall (yes, I was getting desperate).
Obviously this is a bad idea for a whole host of technical reasons (GPS is unreliable in cities or heavily wooded areas, easy to tamper with, requires time to lock on, is expensive, and way more complicated than a simple odometer), but the biggest problem with this is that it's a stupid rumor that keeps coming back every 6 months.
Re:Someone actually listens to NPR?
on
Penny Arcade On NPR
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No, he listens to Fox News. Everbody knows they're unbiased because they remind you every 5 minutes.
Depends where you are. If you're on a digital photo frame that has a hilariously small amount of flash for no good reason, and you're expected to be hooked into a Windows PC, then the hard drive space IS more valuable than the memory, because most modern PCs have more than enough memory to hold a few MB of packed and unpacked picture loader application.
To be fair, the counterpoint to this is the Euro system where you basically pay twice as much to place the calls. In the US system the sender and the receiver split the cost of the call, in the Euro system the sender pays all of it. There's a reason caller-id is standard on all US cell plans though, since they have to make the decision to take some charges if they accept the call.
Re:The author is wrong about accupuncture
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You're saying that by sticking needles into the skin you can change the behavior of the ATP cycle?!? That should be easy enough to test, but I am skeptical that any such test would lead to a result that you would be happy with.
Your last paragraph is a pretty good description of the Placebo Effect.
Re:The author is wrong about accupuncture
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem with Acupuncture is that the practitioners still prescribe to the theory that the needles redirect a person's Chi and whatnot. To modern medicine this is about as useful as describing a treatment that restores balance to the four bodily humors.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that TCP/IP is not the proper protocol for this, something like DTN is far better suited for his connectivity situation, especially since you could theoretically get an international phone service and have most bulk data sent only when you get close enough to port to relay through cell phone services. He could even write up an Email convergence layer if he wanted and theoretically get around the online time limitations (even if, as I suspect, email is only sent in big batches at non-peak times). The downside is that this depends greatly on how the online access is structured in the ship, and doing something like this would be somewhere between difficult and near impossible.
Assuming you like paying $4/minute for coverage (assuming you can find some amazing cut-rate airtime broker). And when jstockdale says "old-school dialup", he doesn't mean "like having to use a modem instead of DSL", he means "you're not going to get the 2400 baud this thing advertises".
Anybody who has worked on driver code can tell you that most hardware vendors ship an errata with their chip. Some hardware has rather significant erratas, like the SiI 3112 SATA controller that got installed in pretty much every SATA compatible motherboard back before SATA support was properly integrated into Southbridges. The CMD 640 is another example of a chip with an extensive hardware errata.
It doesn't help that most programming languages are lousy at validating input. C is especially bad as it has poor pattern matching capabilities by default and no dynamically sized structures. Worse, it offers absolutely no heap checking capabilities meaning at the end of the day your function is forced to trust the input instead of verifying it for itself. You can use fgets() with a buffer size listed, but if that passed buffer size is wrong for whatever reason there is no way in the language for fgets() or anything else to safely handle or even detect it.
That said, it's not impossible to write safe C code. In fact it's not even all that difficult, but it does mean that even small otherwise unrelated errors in your code can be surprising security problems.
What if by not cleaning it the virus installs a boatload of malware that effectively disables the computers and leaks confidential patient data to all manner of criminal networks? Would you want to be the person who didn't press the enter key in that situation?
You're basically paying $200,000 for the luxury of not having to deal with airport parking.
Maybe it automatically DRMs them? That would be the next logical step.
According to TFA: Yes
Where the heck are you finding 75Mhz LCD displays?
Well, if your ISP supports IPv6 you won't even need to run something like dhclient, autoconfiguration is built right into the protocol. You'll just suddenly have an address when you connect. Downside: your ISP does not support IPv6.
The other option is to set up an IPv6 tunnel on top of IPv4, which is complicated (especially if your IP is dynamic, which it is) and means you get to send all of your data through some node somewhere before it goes out to the internet at large (adding hops). Basically it's a fair bit of work to get you access to the same internet you already have access to, only slower.
Or is that list of ipv6 capable ISPs depressingly short? All I see on there are a handful of tiny mom and pop shops and perhaps some larger foreign ISPs. Until Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, NTT, Telekom, or any other major ISPs start showing up on that list all of this IPv6 stuff is going to remain a research toy. I would use IPv6 now if my ISP supported it. I'm not really interested in setting up a complicated tunnel for effectively no benefit. That IPv6 porn site never even got off of the ground.
Seems simple enough.
I remember when this came out. I thought to myself "I'll sign up when I run into a website that needs it." Except for this article, that was the last I'd ever heard of it. I'm amazed it is still around.
It seems likely to me that since Google is full of really smart people who seem to have a touch of the NIH syndrome, it probably isn't surprising that they wanted to develop their own routers from scratch instead of paying through the nose for Cisco or Juniper devices, especially since they needed hundreds or thousands of them and really don't want to have to pay for support contracts. I'd see a Google router announcement as just a productization of something they already use internally, just like Protocol Buffers.
The problem is that Google develops tech internally that is extremely good at solving their problems, but they don't always apply well outside of Google. Protocol Buffers aren't exactly obsoleting XML and from all indications they probably never will. The Google router will probably be super fast and simple, but lack a whole bunch of the more obscure features. The problem is that there's someone out there for each one of those obscure features, and if you don't support it your product won't even make it in the door. This is a problem Juniper runs into a lot, they have good and fast hardware, but the only thing it does is route.
In fact the article points out that Google's router is most likely to compete directly with Juniper instead of Cisco.
Actually, big areas of the country are tone dialing only. Usually entire regions are switched over as part of an equipment upgrade. When this happens, the phone company basically calls everybody who is still sending pulses down the line and tells them that in 1 month or whatever their old pulse phones won't work anymore. They typically offer to upgrade any archaic pulse-only phones for free when this happens.
Given that this switchover was hitting even semi-rural areas like Bluefield, WV several years ago, I'd bet that your average American Slashdotter would discover that switching their phone to "pulse" would prevent it from successfully dialing.
It won't be sold as "collision proof", but it will be rebranded as "automated braking assist" or something like that. Then, like you said it will start trickling through the available car lines starting with the luxury models first and eventually maybe even making it down to the economy models. I don't think the liability issue will be a big one, cars already have similar technologies like adaptive cruise control that in my mind would be more risky than this and the liability issue hasn't (AFAIK) come up yet.
There was another story where a GP hull collided with a neutron star. The hull was fine, but the contents of the hull were smashed down into a mass about the size of an atom and plastered on the inside front of the hull.
The thing I hated about RA3 was that it was designed for co-op online play, which was fine (I had a friend I wanted to play through it with), but then they are still using the same networking code they used for the original C&C. If you don't have a direct connection to the internet or one of what seems like 3 piece of crap "home routers" that they support, good luck getting an online game set up. The tech support consists of "it should just automagically work, if it doesn't try running this Ultima Online tester and see what it says...". I never once got an online game of it successfully started, even after directly connecting to the internet and turning off the firewall (yes, I was getting desperate).
Obviously this is a bad idea for a whole host of technical reasons (GPS is unreliable in cities or heavily wooded areas, easy to tamper with, requires time to lock on, is expensive, and way more complicated than a simple odometer), but the biggest problem with this is that it's a stupid rumor that keeps coming back every 6 months.
No, he listens to Fox News. Everbody knows they're unbiased because they remind you every 5 minutes.
The guy who did it decided to take a break from the strip. His last strip even provided some meta-commentary on how he felt about the strip.
Depends where you are. If you're on a digital photo frame that has a hilariously small amount of flash for no good reason, and you're expected to be hooked into a Windows PC, then the hard drive space IS more valuable than the memory, because most modern PCs have more than enough memory to hold a few MB of packed and unpacked picture loader application.
To be fair, the counterpoint to this is the Euro system where you basically pay twice as much to place the calls. In the US system the sender and the receiver split the cost of the call, in the Euro system the sender pays all of it. There's a reason caller-id is standard on all US cell plans though, since they have to make the decision to take some charges if they accept the call.
You're saying that by sticking needles into the skin you can change the behavior of the ATP cycle?!? That should be easy enough to test, but I am skeptical that any such test would lead to a result that you would be happy with.
Your last paragraph is a pretty good description of the Placebo Effect.
The problem with Acupuncture is that the practitioners still prescribe to the theory that the needles redirect a person's Chi and whatnot. To modern medicine this is about as useful as describing a treatment that restores balance to the four bodily humors.