Except Oracle doesn't have a product competing with MySQL. There are a few earlier comments detailing this. For a real world comparison, consider this: I use UGS Teamcenter Engineering with an Oracle 9i backend, and run pretty little websites with MySQL backends. Teamcenter has enormous amounts of data going through it all the time, but Oracle (although sometimes slowly) handles everything without fail. On the other hand, MySQL will periodically crash if I get too much web traffic...I'm not saying MySQL is bad, it just has its place. So does Oracle. They should not try to do each other's jobs.
I think a more accurate real life equivalent would be your richer next-door neighbor evicting you from your house because he didn't like the way your siding looked.
It might have something to do with the fact that the EMB-190 is smaller and more traditional aircraft. The 787 has almost THREE TIMES the capacity of a 190, FOUR TIMES the range, and is implementing a huge amount of new advanced technology ranging from composite structures, electric air conditioning, and improved engine performance. As far as aircraft go, you're comparing apples and oranges. Concerning in flight entertainment, its pretty irrelevant when your aircraft is overweight and behind schedule. It has to be delivered to clients and be able to get off the ground.
"So, obviously, they didn't spec this out with commodity hardware"
No, they didn't, because you can't use commodity hardware on an airplane. Any hardware you put on an aircraft has to be certified for aerospace applications.
I have an Acer Travelmate C303XMi convertible tablet running Windows XP Tablet edition. I will check out this bug on that machine and report back soon.
I've used lots of engineering CAD programs, and I haven't seen AutoCAD used by any serious engineer. My experience goes back a while. I've run Lockheed ACAD, DARcorporation Aero-CADD in the past and now rely on CSi Concepts Unlimited, UGS NX4 with Teamcenter Engineering, and UGS SolidEdge.
The tools in UG make it very powerful for engineering, and I just haven't seen that matched by Autodesk. However, when its time to export drawings from a UG model, we use DWG files because its easy, and they work. Of course, we're paying for the privilege, but just about anyone with UG is. That privilege, of course, is to not use AutoCAD but still get nice DWG files from our models. From a 3D perspective, you can feel pretty confident in having a $200,000 wind tunnel model machined also.
Concepts is a fantastic program for rapid prototyping. Its easy to use, new users pick it up quickly, many of the same features as CATIA and UG, and excellent object associativity. Arguably, its one of the most powerful and friendly CAD programs I have ever used, and reasonably priced. I use it in aerospace and it when a model needs to be done quickly, Concepts will help get it done.
People trust their lives to machines designed with Pro/E, UG, and CATIA every day. UG was developed by McDonnell-Douglas (now Boeing) and used extensively in-house, alongside what became Teamcenter. CATIA was designed by Dassault and is still used by them. Dassault is known for business jets and fighter aircraft.
IBM AS/400 9402: IBM POWER RS64 running OS/400 V4R4 IBM AS/400 9406-500: IBM POWER RS64 running OS/400 V4R3 Sun Ultra 1 Creator3D: Sun/TI UltraSPARC I Hornet running Solaris 9 Sun Ultra 10 Creator: Sun UltraSPARC IIi running Solaris 10 Dell Precision 670: Xeon EM64T running XP64 and Suse 10.1
All the software I need to run on the IBMs and Suns works fine. The Dell is a nightmare to maintain, programs flat out DON'T RUN or act weird. Under Windows, CSi Concepts Unlimited (a professional CAD program) doesn't work, UGS NX4 didn't work right at first, and an ugly hack was necessary for my printer to work. Under Linux, NX4 works great, the printer prints, and the machine is noticeably quicker.
I run the network for a small company, and there's only a couple ISPs in town. We use the local hometown media company, a phone/tv/internet provider. Recently, some of my emails have been getting bounced back to me from SBC and Deutsche Telekom. Deutsche Telekom has blacklisted our entire IP range, separate from any blacklists I know of. Since the local company has their static address range right in the middle of their dynamic address range, I can't get emails to t-online.de addresses. I haven't talked to SBC yet, but I think I'm going to get a similar response. Email to sbcglobal.net or prodigy.net addresses is sporadically bounced back with a message telling me to email SBC at an address that (ironically) has a full inbox and isn't accepting mail. I know that ISPs block certain known spam offenders, but this is gratuitous. I wonder if large ISPs are going to be doing massive vigilante IP blacklisting to combat spam. If so, the future should prove interesting.
I'd say a battlebot. My team competed in season five.
Next up would be the catapult some fellow engineers and I designed and built to launch a rubber chicken for a contest. That chicken got some good airtime, darn near ended up in the next zip code. We won the contest.
AC said: "Cessna (part of the horizontally integrated evil monopoly of Textron) has done more to raise the cost of aviation then any other entity but the trial lawyers. Cessna & Lycoming are still selling aircraft and engines desgined in the 50's with and built with 50's era technology, and that's expensive and dangerous."
Care to expound upon how Cessna makes GA more expensive? R&D on the single engine line is limited, they just crank out airplanes that are known to have good handling qualities and decent performance. Look up how much a 20 year old Piper Saratoga costs today and how much a slighly smaller 172 costs. Also find out how much maintenance costs are and what you're actually paying for. Engine overhauls are nice and pricy. Then get back to me about how Cessna drives up the cost of aviation.
The Teledyne/Continental/Lycoming engine designs work. Why do so many people use Chevy 350 engines in cars? Because they work well, and there are lots of them. Same goes for the O-320 series engines. Aircraft engines are so expensive because if your Chevy engine conks out, you just pull over to the side of the road. If your aircraft engine conks out, you've got a whole bunch of things to worry about if you can't get it restarted. The engines are built to survive conditions that auto engines are not. The robustness of the design and construction is vital to ensure that the engine performs when it is needed. That is what makes them expensive. The engines work, so there hasn't been a need to radically redesign them. Everybody uses these engines, so don't go trashing Textron (which isn't a monopoly, I don't know where you get that idea).
Obivously you are not familiar with the Citation line of aircraft. Did you know that the Citation X is the fastest GA aircraft in the world? How about that the CJ3 just received a single-pilot certification, exempting it from FAR23 requirements, making it he largest single-pilot aircraft in the world? Or that the Mustang was designed and built once, whereas the 500 has had numerous redesigns, and its still not right.
Two VLJ prototypes (manufactured by Spectrum and Grob) have been destroyed in the past few months, killing three test pilots. Neither of these companies listened to older, wiser companies about how to go about aircraft design. They just wanted to get in on the VLJ craze, and they cut corners to do it.
*Note: I do not work for any Textron company I just use their products (Cessna, Bell, Lycoming, McCauley) all the time and have extensive knowledge of them from an engineering standpoint.
...and industry is going with civil UAVs. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) releases an annual poster listing all the world's UAVs. The last one I have is the "2005 Worldwide UAV Roundup." Guess which country has the most UAVs? Yup, the United States. And, the vast majority of them are not military or attack aircraft. Alternatively, you can pick up a Shepard UAV Handbook. That will list them all out as well.
I work for a very well known aircraft design and consulting firm in the US. We have worked on numerous civilan UAVs. Personally, I have been a design reviewer for two UAV programs, performed engine testing for another program, and am currently coordinating flight test for another. Let me tell you a few things from the perspective of someone in the business.
The Yamaha RMAX (mentioned in the article) is a nifty helicopter. It uses a water cooled engine, has composite body shell, airframe, and rotor blades, and a nice onboard computer called YACS. Recently, a nearby company in collaboration with the local university installed a third party autopilot system that interface with the YACS and a ground station controller. The RMAX had first autonomous flight at a remote Air National Guard range and was successful. The 150 meter range restriction placed on the helicopter has very little to do with its performance; the RMAX can easily fly much farther and higher. Some useful applications for an RMAX in the US would be for highway traffic monitoring in busy cities ($150,000 UAV vs. several million dollar Bell 206), search and rescue, surveillance, and low cost aerial photography.
Aircraft can avoid each other, contrary to what the article states. Other users have mentioned TCAS, which warns a pilot when he is too close to another aircraft. The system interfaces with the aircraft's transponder and flight control system to decide what course correction should be made. For two aircraft approaching each other, opposite instructions will be given to the pilots so they fly away from each other. In a UAV, a system like this can be easily modified to simply command the flight control system to change course. In coordination with sense-and-avoid systems (RADAR), terrain avoidance, and other aircraft transponders, a safe automatic flight control system can be made for UAVs.
The technology for UAVs is young, and the equipment being used in many UAVs is not up to par because the only regulation is "you can't fly UAVs." Commercial airliners have triple redundancy for flight critical systems. If you think you have a rat's nest of cabling in your server rooms, you've never seen the wiring in a jet. Even a business jet has a enormous quantity of wires running through it. The reason for so much redundancy is very simple: if aircraft systems fail, people die. Death is generally bad. Since there is nobody onboard UAVs, the same redundancy is rarely installed. I have not worked with a single UAV that has any sort of redundancy for flight critical systems. Now, I'm not saying all UAVs are this way; the GlobalHawk is most certainly well equipped with redundant systems. Because the manufacturing cost of UAVs is so much lower than manned aircraft, many are considered expendable. The maintenance costs of manned aircraft are very large, and for some aircraft, those costs can eclipse the acquisition price very quickly.
There are many people involved in working with industry and the government to get UAVs flying in the US. Standard and regulations need to be formed, and I know several folks involved with that. Take a look at RTCA Special Committe 203 (SC203 Unmanned Aircraft Systems). Also look at groups like the Kansas UAV Consortium. They are comprised of industry, academia, government, and military partners dedicated to promoting UAV operations in Kansas and the US.
The UAVs flying today are rather impressive. In October I was an exhibitor at the Unmanned Aerial Systems/Future Systems Symposium. There were demonstrations of the Aerovironment Raven and AAI Shadow 200 UAVs. Both the Raven and Shadow demonstrated very good flying qualities. The Shadow even performed a flawless landing on a dirt runway.
Safety issues will be solved. If you're worried about the safety about civil UAVs when they get here, you aren't
I'm honestly surprised by how few people in the slashdot community know anything about autopilots and unmanned aircraft. First of all, everyone who thinks UAVs are a bad idea have no clue what is happening when a modern airliner flies today. The vast majority of the time the aircraft is under computer control. The pilot watches some numbers on screens and occassionally pushes some buttons. When he wants to really fly, he will, but he doesn't have to. The aircraft can even line up for landing, land, and taxi to a gate. This is actually done in the UK, but not in the US. The average traveler has no idea.
Autopilot technology has existed for years. Analog automatic flight control systems have been around quite some time; a 40 year old IFR certified Cessna is quite capable. Digital flight controls have helped a lot. With GPS, and inertial navigation (INS) using MEMS accelerometers and magnetometers, waypoint navigation by maps without VOR is easy. Check out the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit system, its capabilities in the area of automatic flight control have been very good for the general aviation industry.
Believe it or not, but the people with PhDs in aerospace engineering know what they are talking about. Passenger aircraft today have triple redundancy for flight critical systems. UAVs are just as well made. The GlobalHawk has proven this time and time again for the military.
...measured right now is 2457.6kbps on Sprint's EVDO network while sitting in my apartment. I use an HTC PPC6700. My favorite speed record is arguably the 1228.8kbps I can pull down in rural Franklin County, Kansas. I am quite impressed with it. Until some service that is way cooler and some device that is way more powerful than the 6700 come out, I have little to complain about.
However, Sprint is retarded when it comes to PAM (phone as modem) use. If you have the cheap plan and try to use your phone as a modem, it will dial, authenticate, connect, and function at 921.6kbps, and then drop you after about 45 seconds. If you call to complain, they tell you to buy the $40/month data plan instead of the $15/month plan.
Yeah, you have to love Sprint's technology, but hate their business practices.
Some of us are trying to figure out what to do about this. Questions like "how long do we have?" and "how much ice is there" and even "how fast is the ice melting" are all questions that researchers at the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) are trying to answer. They've done a huge amount of work and have even more coming. Not all of us Americans are backwards and ignorant of our environment.
No, I will not get my relatives to use Linux, BSD, etc.
Why? Because if you are using a consumer-grade OS you will always be running *something* that will have some vulnerability in it, even if it has yet to be discovered. Once it is, and exploited, it really doesn't matter. The vulnerability could be a problem in programming or a problem with the user. I have seen so many people say, "I'll switch to x and I'll be safe!" and then regret it. Its like saying "I'm going to drive a Volvo and I'll be safe!" Sure, you might be safer, but if you drive off a cliff you're still going to die. Its no panacea. I'm not even going to get into the whole usability issue of Linux and BSD for home users.
You are ignorant if you believe that different architectures solve the problem. The vast majority of exploit programs I see are written in perl. If you really want to use the different architectures argument, you've got to get pretty arcane. Then you have to ask yourself: "Was this worth it? Or could I simply have followed good security concepts?"
The average computer user can almost handle Windows. It is arrogant to believe they can also handle *nix. With the advent of Ubuntu and other "friendly" linux distros, it is also becoming apparent that less of the linux userbase has a clue.
As someone who works for an aerospace consulting agency in the United States, I guess this means fewer DoS, website defacement, software stealing, and general hacking attempts from Iran. I got tons of crap from them and banned netblock after netblock from there. With less bandwidth, it will be harder for people like those at the "holy institute" that took out my web server for two days to cause trouble. Additionally, I will now have more time to tend to my other duties.
Its not just countries that are deemed "sketchy" in the United States that are problematic. I block 82.0.0.0 and 83.0.0.0 on my mail server because I get nothing but spam from those networks. Its clear the ISPs don't give a damn about their bandwidth being wasted or the security of their users. As far as Asian problems go, my IDS blocks an IP from somewhere in 211.0.0.0 every other day or so.
I constantly get scanned and have break-in attempts on port 22. However I beefed up my security and don't get as many people trying. I sort of miss those "the following host has been blocked" emails my IDS would give me.
Hm...so this here purple panda bear says he wants to be my buddy and help me out on the intarweb. Sounds good to me! (click) Gosh I wonder why my workstation is so slow, almost as if its sending all its files to ch!@$!$JGOJ!THIS POST 0WNZ0R3D BY CHINESE HAXORS
Slashdot Mirror
Mere matter of programming? I guess you've never done CFD...
Except Oracle doesn't have a product competing with MySQL. There are a few earlier comments detailing this. For a real world comparison, consider this: I use UGS Teamcenter Engineering with an Oracle 9i backend, and run pretty little websites with MySQL backends. Teamcenter has enormous amounts of data going through it all the time, but Oracle (although sometimes slowly) handles everything without fail. On the other hand, MySQL will periodically crash if I get too much web traffic...I'm not saying MySQL is bad, it just has its place. So does Oracle. They should not try to do each other's jobs.
No thanks, I'm not that into Pokemon.
I think a more accurate real life equivalent would be your richer next-door neighbor evicting you from your house because he didn't like the way your siding looked.
It might have something to do with the fact that the EMB-190 is smaller and more traditional aircraft. The 787 has almost THREE TIMES the capacity of a 190, FOUR TIMES the range, and is implementing a huge amount of new advanced technology ranging from composite structures, electric air conditioning, and improved engine performance. As far as aircraft go, you're comparing apples and oranges. Concerning in flight entertainment, its pretty irrelevant when your aircraft is overweight and behind schedule. It has to be delivered to clients and be able to get off the ground.
"So, obviously, they didn't spec this out with commodity hardware"
No, they didn't, because you can't use commodity hardware on an airplane. Any hardware you put on an aircraft has to be certified for aerospace applications.
I have an Acer Travelmate C303XMi convertible tablet running Windows XP Tablet edition. I will check out this bug on that machine and report back soon.
The tools in UG make it very powerful for engineering, and I just haven't seen that matched by Autodesk. However, when its time to export drawings from a UG model, we use DWG files because its easy, and they work. Of course, we're paying for the privilege, but just about anyone with UG is. That privilege, of course, is to not use AutoCAD but still get nice DWG files from our models. From a 3D perspective, you can feel pretty confident in having a $200,000 wind tunnel model machined also.
Concepts is a fantastic program for rapid prototyping. Its easy to use, new users pick it up quickly, many of the same features as CATIA and UG, and excellent object associativity. Arguably, its one of the most powerful and friendly CAD programs I have ever used, and reasonably priced. I use it in aerospace and it when a model needs to be done quickly, Concepts will help get it done.
People trust their lives to machines designed with Pro/E, UG, and CATIA every day. UG was developed by McDonnell-Douglas (now Boeing) and used extensively in-house, alongside what became Teamcenter. CATIA was designed by Dassault and is still used by them. Dassault is known for business jets and fighter aircraft.
What does Autodesk have? A lawsuit.
Same here. The 64-bit fleet:
IBM AS/400 9402: IBM POWER RS64 running OS/400 V4R4
IBM AS/400 9406-500: IBM POWER RS64 running OS/400 V4R3
Sun Ultra 1 Creator3D: Sun/TI UltraSPARC I Hornet running Solaris 9
Sun Ultra 10 Creator: Sun UltraSPARC IIi running Solaris 10
Dell Precision 670: Xeon EM64T running XP64 and Suse 10.1
All the software I need to run on the IBMs and Suns works fine. The Dell is a nightmare to maintain, programs flat out DON'T RUN or act weird. Under Windows, CSi Concepts Unlimited (a professional CAD program) doesn't work, UGS NX4 didn't work right at first, and an ugly hack was necessary for my printer to work. Under Linux, NX4 works great, the printer prints, and the machine is noticeably quicker.
I run the network for a small company, and there's only a couple ISPs in town. We use the local hometown media company, a phone/tv/internet provider. Recently, some of my emails have been getting bounced back to me from SBC and Deutsche Telekom. Deutsche Telekom has blacklisted our entire IP range, separate from any blacklists I know of. Since the local company has their static address range right in the middle of their dynamic address range, I can't get emails to t-online.de addresses. I haven't talked to SBC yet, but I think I'm going to get a similar response. Email to sbcglobal.net or prodigy.net addresses is sporadically bounced back with a message telling me to email SBC at an address that (ironically) has a full inbox and isn't accepting mail. I know that ISPs block certain known spam offenders, but this is gratuitous. I wonder if large ISPs are going to be doing massive vigilante IP blacklisting to combat spam. If so, the future should prove interesting.
I'd say a battlebot. My team competed in season five. Next up would be the catapult some fellow engineers and I designed and built to launch a rubber chicken for a contest. That chicken got some good airtime, darn near ended up in the next zip code. We won the contest.
Are you a Triangle by chance? We terrorized the lot of the "dumb jock" fraternities and some of the sorority houses nearby.
AC said: "Cessna (part of the horizontally integrated evil monopoly of Textron) has done more to raise the cost of aviation then any other entity but the trial lawyers. Cessna & Lycoming are still selling aircraft and engines desgined in the 50's with and built with 50's era technology, and that's expensive and dangerous."
Care to expound upon how Cessna makes GA more expensive? R&D on the single engine line is limited, they just crank out airplanes that are known to have good handling qualities and decent performance. Look up how much a 20 year old Piper Saratoga costs today and how much a slighly smaller 172 costs. Also find out how much maintenance costs are and what you're actually paying for. Engine overhauls are nice and pricy. Then get back to me about how Cessna drives up the cost of aviation.
The Teledyne/Continental/Lycoming engine designs work. Why do so many people use Chevy 350 engines in cars? Because they work well, and there are lots of them. Same goes for the O-320 series engines. Aircraft engines are so expensive because if your Chevy engine conks out, you just pull over to the side of the road. If your aircraft engine conks out, you've got a whole bunch of things to worry about if you can't get it restarted. The engines are built to survive conditions that auto engines are not. The robustness of the design and construction is vital to ensure that the engine performs when it is needed. That is what makes them expensive. The engines work, so there hasn't been a need to radically redesign them. Everybody uses these engines, so don't go trashing Textron (which isn't a monopoly, I don't know where you get that idea).
Obivously you are not familiar with the Citation line of aircraft. Did you know that the Citation X is the fastest GA aircraft in the world? How about that the CJ3 just received a single-pilot certification, exempting it from FAR23 requirements, making it he largest single-pilot aircraft in the world? Or that the Mustang was designed and built once, whereas the 500 has had numerous redesigns, and its still not right.
Two VLJ prototypes (manufactured by Spectrum and Grob) have been destroyed in the past few months, killing three test pilots. Neither of these companies listened to older, wiser companies about how to go about aircraft design. They just wanted to get in on the VLJ craze, and they cut corners to do it.
*Note: I do not work for any Textron company I just use their products (Cessna, Bell, Lycoming, McCauley) all the time and have extensive knowledge of them from an engineering standpoint.
...and industry is going with civil UAVs. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) releases an annual poster listing all the world's UAVs. The last one I have is the "2005 Worldwide UAV Roundup." Guess which country has the most UAVs? Yup, the United States. And, the vast majority of them are not military or attack aircraft. Alternatively, you can pick up a Shepard UAV Handbook. That will list them all out as well.
The Yamaha RMAX (mentioned in the article) is a nifty helicopter. It uses a water cooled engine, has composite body shell, airframe, and rotor blades, and a nice onboard computer called YACS. Recently, a nearby company in collaboration with the local university installed a third party autopilot system that interface with the YACS and a ground station controller. The RMAX had first autonomous flight at a remote Air National Guard range and was successful. The 150 meter range restriction placed on the helicopter has very little to do with its performance; the RMAX can easily fly much farther and higher. Some useful applications for an RMAX in the US would be for highway traffic monitoring in busy cities ($150,000 UAV vs. several million dollar Bell 206), search and rescue, surveillance, and low cost aerial photography.
Aircraft can avoid each other, contrary to what the article states. Other users have mentioned TCAS, which warns a pilot when he is too close to another aircraft. The system interfaces with the aircraft's transponder and flight control system to decide what course correction should be made. For two aircraft approaching each other, opposite instructions will be given to the pilots so they fly away from each other. In a UAV, a system like this can be easily modified to simply command the flight control system to change course. In coordination with sense-and-avoid systems (RADAR), terrain avoidance, and other aircraft transponders, a safe automatic flight control system can be made for UAVs.
The technology for UAVs is young, and the equipment being used in many UAVs is not up to par because the only regulation is "you can't fly UAVs." Commercial airliners have triple redundancy for flight critical systems. If you think you have a rat's nest of cabling in your server rooms, you've never seen the wiring in a jet. Even a business jet has a enormous quantity of wires running through it. The reason for so much redundancy is very simple: if aircraft systems fail, people die. Death is generally bad. Since there is nobody onboard UAVs, the same redundancy is rarely installed. I have not worked with a single UAV that has any sort of redundancy for flight critical systems. Now, I'm not saying all UAVs are this way; the GlobalHawk is most certainly well equipped with redundant systems. Because the manufacturing cost of UAVs is so much lower than manned aircraft, many are considered expendable. The maintenance costs of manned aircraft are very large, and for some aircraft, those costs can eclipse the acquisition price very quickly.
There are many people involved in working with industry and the government to get UAVs flying in the US. Standard and regulations need to be formed, and I know several folks involved with that. Take a look at RTCA Special Committe 203 (SC203 Unmanned Aircraft Systems). Also look at groups like the Kansas UAV Consortium. They are comprised of industry, academia, government, and military partners dedicated to promoting UAV operations in Kansas and the US.
The UAVs flying today are rather impressive. In October I was an exhibitor at the Unmanned Aerial Systems/Future Systems Symposium. There were demonstrations of the Aerovironment Raven and AAI Shadow 200 UAVs. Both the Raven and Shadow demonstrated very good flying qualities. The Shadow even performed a flawless landing on a dirt runway.
Safety issues will be solved. If you're worried about the safety about civil UAVs when they get here, you aren't
I'm honestly surprised by how few people in the slashdot community know anything about autopilots and unmanned aircraft. First of all, everyone who thinks UAVs are a bad idea have no clue what is happening when a modern airliner flies today. The vast majority of the time the aircraft is under computer control. The pilot watches some numbers on screens and occassionally pushes some buttons. When he wants to really fly, he will, but he doesn't have to. The aircraft can even line up for landing, land, and taxi to a gate. This is actually done in the UK, but not in the US. The average traveler has no idea.
Autopilot technology has existed for years. Analog automatic flight control systems have been around quite some time; a 40 year old IFR certified Cessna is quite capable. Digital flight controls have helped a lot. With GPS, and inertial navigation (INS) using MEMS accelerometers and magnetometers, waypoint navigation by maps without VOR is easy. Check out the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit system, its capabilities in the area of automatic flight control have been very good for the general aviation industry.
Believe it or not, but the people with PhDs in aerospace engineering know what they are talking about. Passenger aircraft today have triple redundancy for flight critical systems. UAVs are just as well made. The GlobalHawk has proven this time and time again for the military.
I'll post more on this later.
...measured right now is 2457.6kbps on Sprint's EVDO network while sitting in my apartment. I use an HTC PPC6700. My favorite speed record is arguably the 1228.8kbps I can pull down in rural Franklin County, Kansas. I am quite impressed with it. Until some service that is way cooler and some device that is way more powerful than the 6700 come out, I have little to complain about.
However, Sprint is retarded when it comes to PAM (phone as modem) use. If you have the cheap plan and try to use your phone as a modem, it will dial, authenticate, connect, and function at 921.6kbps, and then drop you after about 45 seconds. If you call to complain, they tell you to buy the $40/month data plan instead of the $15/month plan.
Yeah, you have to love Sprint's technology, but hate their business practices.
I'm able to converse with someone over Skype using EVDO on Sprint. Works fine while crusing the highway.
Some of us are trying to figure out what to do about this. Questions like "how long do we have?" and "how much ice is there" and even "how fast is the ice melting" are all questions that researchers at the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) are trying to answer. They've done a huge amount of work and have even more coming. Not all of us Americans are backwards and ignorant of our environment.
No, I will not get my relatives to use Linux, BSD, etc.
Why? Because if you are using a consumer-grade OS you will always be running *something* that will have some vulnerability in it, even if it has yet to be discovered. Once it is, and exploited, it really doesn't matter. The vulnerability could be a problem in programming or a problem with the user. I have seen so many people say, "I'll switch to x and I'll be safe!" and then regret it. Its like saying "I'm going to drive a Volvo and I'll be safe!" Sure, you might be safer, but if you drive off a cliff you're still going to die. Its no panacea. I'm not even going to get into the whole usability issue of Linux and BSD for home users.
You are ignorant if you believe that different architectures solve the problem. The vast majority of exploit programs I see are written in perl. If you really want to use the different architectures argument, you've got to get pretty arcane. Then you have to ask yourself: "Was this worth it? Or could I simply have followed good security concepts?"
The average computer user can almost handle Windows. It is arrogant to believe they can also handle *nix. With the advent of Ubuntu and other "friendly" linux distros, it is also becoming apparent that less of the linux userbase has a clue.
As someone who works for an aerospace consulting agency in the United States, I guess this means fewer DoS, website defacement, software stealing, and general hacking attempts from Iran. I got tons of crap from them and banned netblock after netblock from there. With less bandwidth, it will be harder for people like those at the "holy institute" that took out my web server for two days to cause trouble. Additionally, I will now have more time to tend to my other duties.
Its not just countries that are deemed "sketchy" in the United States that are problematic. I block 82.0.0.0 and 83.0.0.0 on my mail server because I get nothing but spam from those networks. Its clear the ISPs don't give a damn about their bandwidth being wasted or the security of their users. As far as Asian problems go, my IDS blocks an IP from somewhere in 211.0.0.0 every other day or so.
I constantly get scanned and have break-in attempts on port 22. However I beefed up my security and don't get as many people trying. I sort of miss those "the following host has been blocked" emails my IDS would give me.
Hm...so this here purple panda bear says he wants to be my buddy and help me out on the intarweb. Sounds good to me! (click) Gosh I wonder why my workstation is so slow, almost as if its sending all its files to ch!@$!$JGOJ!THIS POST 0WNZ0R3D BY CHINESE HAXORS
...every one of the employees would be fired. However, in the US government these days, not doing anything seems to be the norm.