Frankly, what linux really needs is a working network filesystem.
NFS is just a real mess. It has all kinds of security issues, and has no concept of users beyond the local machine. If/etc/passwd isn't synced across the network all kinds of stuff goes wrong. It also has a lot of limits around permissions/etc.
Probably the next closest usable network filesystem for linux is samba - which really isn't ideal (for one it is almost entirely reverse-engineered and depends on a spec that isn't open). That filesystem does handle many of these issues, but not in a linux-friendly way.
I just can't believe that nobody considers it important to have file sharing over a network that "just works". Windows has had fairly simple to set up file serving from the desktop for at least a decade. Sure, like all things windows they had a number of security bugs, but that has settled down a bit.
OpenAFS seems to have some potential, but nobody uses it, and it is a bit of a pain to set up since it has so many layers to it. Is anybody working on a simple way to have users on a network be able to mount their home directories remotely with working permissions and non-synced/etc/passwd?
The Top Gear presenters kept comparing it to Concorde. That's how big of a leap forward it was.
And about how practical it was as well... The Concorde may be a very appropriate analogy.
Yes, it works. Yes, some could afford it. Yes, it is actually somewhat practical provided you're willing to pay 100X the cost of other options for getting from point A to point B.
Yes, it will also sell about as many units as the concorde did. Yes, it will have about as much impact on driving as the Concorde had on aviation. No, chances are you'll never ride in anything like it.
Who knows, maybe somebody will come up with a more practical alternative - both for the plane and this car.
I agree with most of what you wrote. However, it isn't entirely in keeping with the constitution.
The US is not a parliamentary democracy - it is a 3-branch government. The president is actually on equal footing with all of congress within the constitutional bounds of his office. Other than the ability to impeach the president, the congress does not have any particular special investigatory power over the president.
Most western democracies use a parliamentary system of government. The prime minister is the chief executive, but is merely an appointed representative of the legislature. The prime minister serves at the pleasure of the legislature and is fully answerable to it. The relationship is similar to a CEO and the board of directors - the CEO is just a regular company employee that the board has hired to run day-to-day operations.
In the US the president is directly elected, and while there are checks and balances in general the office of the president is completely independent of the legislature. There is a duty to uphold the laws of the US, but no real accountability for not doing so (other than impeachment).
The problem with Bush wasn't that he thumbed his nose at Congress so much as the fact that he was elected (twice!) in the first place. Like it or not more Americans supported him than opposed him (at least up until 2004). You can debate the 2000 election of course, but the fact is that even if he should have lost it would have only been by a slim margain. When a nation supports a president that uses his power in the way it was used, then there is little that can be done to stop it. Like it or not, he had the backing of the populace. Even with the abuses, there really wasn't enough popular support for an impeachment to make it happen. (Just look at how long it took to get rid of Gray Davis in a state known for political activism.)
Honestly, I think I'd prefer a parlimentary proporational democracy to what we have today. However, that isn't the nation we currently live in, and I don't see 3/4ths of the states voting for such a major overhaul of the constitution. So, we're stuck...
Yup. And it only scans the surface of whatever it is probing. So, go ahead and put that brain in a microtome first. Don't bother returning it when you're done with it...:)
He did point out this is an apples-to-oragnes comparison. The flight calculations considered only fuel. The IT calculations were wider in scope (power, manufacture, various infrastructure).
Airlines actually do not fly jets in the most fuel-efficient manner possible. There is a cost index calculation they perform that takes into account just about the entire airline infrastructure that dictates how they fly their planes. Flying slower saves fuel, but it costs more to pay the flight crew, increases time on the aircraft (maintenance and lifetime is based on hours of flight), and ties up the plane longer (which might in the aggregate require more planes to cover the routes). The result is they actually fly planes fairly close to their maximum speeds (the big exception would be on very long routes - where the added range could make the difference in needing one more leg). On a per-passenger basis an airliner is about as fuel-efficient as an SUV - so it shouldn't be surprising that fuel is only one of many costs that need to be considered.
I suspect that all those other costs also have substantial carbon footprints associated with them. I wouldn't be surprised if the fuel only represents maybe half of the carbon cost of a flight. It is just very dramatic to think about 50,000kgs of diesel going up in smoke.
Yeah, and it would probably only take six months of that before the HUGE number of people still left are survival experts extrodinaire.
You see, homo sapiens became the dominant species on the planet because of raw intelligence and the ability to communicate. Oh, sure, the random lion can outpower a human. However, anywhere humans settle you're not going to find wild lions running around. If lions are spotted there would be lots of yelling and shouting and then the lions would be carefully surrounded by 47 guys with spears and bows. More likely than not the lions wouldn't even try to get close - since their evolutionary adaptation is to know what looks like an easy meal and what doesn't.
Humans have been at the top of the food chain for certainly tens of thousands of years at least. Sure, the average american wouldn't be adept with a spear, but even a mentally retarded human has about a million times more learning capacity than just about any other animal out there.
No, if things got that desperate, it wouldn't be the animals we'd be looking out for. You'd see tribal warfare like you're never heard of with all those people fighting over so little food.
All of this is silly, however. The average westerner doesn't know how to hunt and fish because they've adapted to a completely different technology-based world. You'll never see humans give that up voluntarily. About the only thing I can think of that might lead to a hunter-gathering situation would be a full scale nuclear war.
I agree that it is better to treat problems at their root cause.
However, the same logic could be used to suggest that rather than having police lock up bank robbers, we should get rid of the incentive to rob banks. While abolishing money might get rid of robbery, it isn't a practical solution.
If somebody comes up with a practical way of making it unprofitable to be able to hijack 10 million desktop PCs then I'm all for it. However, ignoring practical solutions in favor of non-existant ones seems unwise.
Yeah, but if you do that then the botnet will be patched against the specific takedown code before it makes it through congressional committee.
What probably should happen is that some major world government (US, EU?) should decide that the botnet is a major headache and a threat to national security. Then the info warfare devision of the military would prepare a suitable script that would only disable the bots (perhaps installing a security patch on the way out to prevent reinfection).
Then they just do it. The operation would be classified and launched in a way that would be extremely difficult to trace.
All the pundits on the internet would cry about how horrible an action it was (though nobody would complain about the 95% reduction in spam). However, everybody would blame their favorite love-to-hate government (China, the US, France, whatever:)), while the folks in on the classified operation in the Netherlands laugh every time they get to work. And if by some miracle somebody actually figures out where it came from (large governments could just inject packets on any random telecom line, and even route them through tor if they want), what is anybody going to do about it? Launch a war on Belgium for ridding the world of spam? Levy economic sanctions for saving every company with an email server millions every year.
Big governments kill people all the time in the interest of public safety and security. What's the worse that could happen - a few million home PCs lock up from a poorly-designed script? That could already happen any day if one of Storm's owners makes a mistake.
I'm not big on government trespass on private property. However, if somebody's row home catches on fire and the owner refuses to let in those responsible for putting out the fire, then the police will simply put them in cuffs and let the firemen axe open the door. They might not do it for a single family home, but they'd not let a block go up in flames because some guy refused to cooperate.
If you want to be really nice about it then just put a public service annocement on TV stating that in the coming month the government is going to wipe out the Storm botnet, and that anybody who doesn't like the idea of having the government clean up their PC should opt out by removing their computer from the botnet in the next seven days...
From what I've read over the years getting rid of the SSMEs sounds like a big plus in terms of operational cost. Those engines are true technical marvels, but they are also extremely expensive to turnaround after each flight. They're reusable engines that cost almost as much to reuse as to build from scratch.
I don't profess to be qualified to truly evaluate the proposals on the merits. However I've been involved with large IT projects both on the inside and the outside. Sometimes the renegades are right, and sometimes they're wrong. Just because NASA has a history of blundering doesn't mean that any idea contraditory to something they come up with is a good one.
At work I'm beginning to sense the signs of all the infrastructure cuts (a fortune 500 company). It is getting to the point where I'm constantly getting conflicting meeting requests because free/busy data isn't updating quickly enough in Outlook (lots of people seem to have the problem). If I book a meeting it shows free for many hours. I suspect that somebody is doing the limbo on the number of exchange servers.
I'm all for cutting costs, but when it gets to the point where you get better service from hotmail you have to wonder...
IF they had too much demand then they should have raised prices.
IF they had too little demand then they should have lowered them (ie not charged $400 per laptop in first world nations).
I don't think they had too much demand - despite assertions to the contrary. How does a company with too much demand end up having mass layoffs? However, my point was that even IF (there's that word again) they had too much demand there was a better solution than "give-one-get-one".
Yup. For this reason ext4 is the next big filesystem for linux, and btrfs will probably be next after that. At that point Sun doesn't really have much to offer since btrfs will do just about everything zfs does - zfs will just be what jfs is today - a great concept filesystem that nobody actually uses.
Don't get me wrong - zfs is great stuff. Granted, support for raid-z reshaping would be nice (adding to a raid, removing from a raid, etc - not just adding a new raid to an existing zpool). However, the license is going to end up killing it for linux use.
I never said they had trouble meeting the demand - that was a quotation.
I don't agree that they had trouble meeting the demand - that is my assertion. If they really had trouble with demand they should have raised prices in the first world while still abandoning the whole "give one get one" fiasco. Sure, they could use the profits to give away units, but that doesn't require a 100% markup.
If they're having so much trouble meeting demand, then why are they laying off half their staff?
Don't forget the live component. There is a big difference between a movie where you have 6-18 months to add in FX, and a TV broadcast which is at best delayed a few seconds. In a movie you can conceivably tweak your algorithms to catch the unexpected or clean up a few frames by hand if needed. With live the whole thing needs to work in realtime automatically.
They had trouble meeting the demand, much like Nintendo does with the Wii: Selling more to hose who don't need it would have made things worse, not better.
I have no issues with prioritzing 3rd world orders. However, it doesn't sound like they have trouble with meeting demand now - they have trouble meeting payroll. It hardly sounds like they have droves of people waiting for their product...
I think the attitude problem here is the guy who demands cheap toys and refuses to contribute to charity, not the guys who deny cheap toys to those who won't contribute to charity.
Ok, so their model is to sell $200 toys to people willing to give $200 to charity. Unfortunately there aren't many of the latter, so they ended up going out of business. You can complain that it is the fault of everybody who didn't pay $400 for a $200 laptop, and that's fine. But, it won't do anything to advance 3rd world education.
My point is that selling cheap toys to geeks would have done more to advance the needs of 3rd world children than being picky about who they sold their toys to. They could have made a profit on every sale, and used that to benefit children in the 3rd world. By being exclusive they basically just killed themselves.
If you want to advance the cause of charity then make it worth people's while. I give lots of money to charity. However, I can't give money to every charity on the planet. That isn't an attitude problem on my part - I earned my money and it isn't your perogative to critcize people for how they choose to give it (or not give it) away. When I see charities that have this kind of attitude I'm not inclined to donate - they simply dry up and then another charity with a more charitable attitude fills the void.
I think their holier-than-thou attitude is made particularly obvious from their whole "give-one-get-one" campaign. People who might have been willing to buy an XO for $200 were probably put off by the $400 price tag. If their goal was to increase volume to drive down cost then they should have pursued sales ANYWHERE they could get them. They could even charge a small markup in the first world and use that money towards 3rd-world effots. However, the 100% markup just priced them out of the first world market.
Their attitude seemed to be that we ought to be grateful for the opportunity to donate. My issue with that is that they chose to dicate the amount of contribution. That combined with the attitudes they seemed to come across with made me very hesitant to donate a dime to them.
Well, we see how well that worked out for them. They should have just sold them to anybody who would buy them. Then there would emerge a library of software and buzz that would have helped make the proejct more successful.
Of course, you could always just burn the fuel once in distributed reactors, and then re-burn it in more controlled centrallized reactors.
For all the wars that nuclear power would prevent (no fighting over oil) you'd think we could just garrison 1000 troops in every nuclear power plant. It isn't like some terrorist is going to break into an army base just to steam somewhat-enriched fuel (which is only one component of a bomb).
How hard can it be to secure a nuclear reactor? The closet one to me looks like it has a big permiter fence a good mile from the building. Nobody is going to just waltz into it.
Are you suggesting these guys should just fund their own lab for five years (employing who knows how many people) without a care for whether it will ever make money?
Sure, the government can afford to not worry about profit, but most other people who spend five years on something expect to get something out of it (like their costs for starters).
Unless you're of the mindset that all non-trivial research of any kind anywhere should be funded by taxpayers profitability is going to be a concern. And it isn't like making a profit costs the patients more - they're paying for the R&D one way or another (just via taxes instead of fees).
And who is to say that these guys even care about the money in the first place? Aiming to hit a particular price point is a goal in both the private and public sectors (why else would scientists dream about space elevators but for the possibility of making $1000 probles and launching one a week?).
Frankly - I don't want them to pay attention to details. That causes half the problems we have to deal with. I'd be happy if they just gave out performance evaluations and took the rest of the year off.
However, it would be nice if they pretended that they pay us to have minds and actually listen to our advice once in a while (without requiring us to spend 4 years salary on a big-5 firm to parrot our opinions).
But, how else are you going to get your fancy new Dell laptop to interface with a 1980s sync-on-green 17" 350lbs Sun console monitor?:)
That's why the 99.99999% of linux users who have VESA-compliant plug-and-play monitors manufactured in the last 25 years have configuration files that contain modelines.
I'm involved in a project at my place of employment that has brought in a big-5 consulting firm. I've never seen more beautiful powerpoint presentations in my life. Our group tells them what we want management to go for, and they prepare 15 slides with all the nice 3D shapes, interesting diagrams, etc to sell them on it. Management just eats this stuff up. We could probably get them to buy mortgage securities if we wanted to.
And THAT is why everybody spends so much time on presentation and not on content. The content just isn't important (although spending a lot of money on an opinion helps to make the content sound more important).
The problem is that there is no reason why the vast majority of http communications should be unencrypted as they are today. If you make the SSL verification standards even more stringent, then the cost of obtaining a certificate will raise to a point where SSL will only be used for the most critical functions. Stuff like gmail would be in the clear - which isn't appropriate.
If anything we need to make SSL certs EASIER to obtain, but better distinguish in their use. Even self-signed certs should be usable with browsers clearly explaining the limits of their security and not just flashing warning signs all over the place (which don't appear when not using SSL - even though plain http is even more vulnerable to attack than https using a self-signed certificate).
Yes, that is how it works TODAY. However, it would only take one bill passed by congress (think Patriot Act) to have the government just issue both keys. Don't worry - they'll only use the copy they keep for "important reasons."
Sure - when your threat model is somebody with the ability to intercept network traffic, but not modify it. In that threat model, an encrypted but unauthenticated transmission is secure. An unencrypted transmission is not secure.
And if an encrypted but unauthenticated and a non-encrypted connection are equally insecure, then why does firefox complain about the former and not the latter?
Don't get me wrong - I see the value in PKI and all that. However, the current SSL certificate issuance system is flawed - it is more a measure of willingness to pay cash and not authenticity. Granted, just charging money is going to defeat a number of attacks (you can no longer create millions or billions of attack domains with valid SSL certs). However, the status quo isn't exactly a bed of roses.
Encrypted communications should be the norm on the internet - nothing should be sent in the clear. Granted, I can make some allowance for devices that don't have sufficient CPU to perform AES, but over time that should dwindle. Authenticated communications may not be needed 100% of the time, but if somebody comes up with a good way to make it work I'd be happy to see every TCP packet encrypted and signed.
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Frankly, what linux really needs is a working network filesystem.
NFS is just a real mess. It has all kinds of security issues, and has no concept of users beyond the local machine. If /etc/passwd isn't synced across the network all kinds of stuff goes wrong. It also has a lot of limits around permissions/etc.
Probably the next closest usable network filesystem for linux is samba - which really isn't ideal (for one it is almost entirely reverse-engineered and depends on a spec that isn't open). That filesystem does handle many of these issues, but not in a linux-friendly way.
I just can't believe that nobody considers it important to have file sharing over a network that "just works". Windows has had fairly simple to set up file serving from the desktop for at least a decade. Sure, like all things windows they had a number of security bugs, but that has settled down a bit.
OpenAFS seems to have some potential, but nobody uses it, and it is a bit of a pain to set up since it has so many layers to it. Is anybody working on a simple way to have users on a network be able to mount their home directories remotely with working permissions and non-synced /etc/passwd?
The Top Gear presenters kept comparing it to Concorde. That's how big of a leap forward it was.
And about how practical it was as well... The Concorde may be a very appropriate analogy.
Yes, it works. Yes, some could afford it. Yes, it is actually somewhat practical provided you're willing to pay 100X the cost of other options for getting from point A to point B.
Yes, it will also sell about as many units as the concorde did. Yes, it will have about as much impact on driving as the Concorde had on aviation. No, chances are you'll never ride in anything like it.
Who knows, maybe somebody will come up with a more practical alternative - both for the plane and this car.
I agree with most of what you wrote. However, it isn't entirely in keeping with the constitution.
The US is not a parliamentary democracy - it is a 3-branch government. The president is actually on equal footing with all of congress within the constitutional bounds of his office. Other than the ability to impeach the president, the congress does not have any particular special investigatory power over the president.
Most western democracies use a parliamentary system of government. The prime minister is the chief executive, but is merely an appointed representative of the legislature. The prime minister serves at the pleasure of the legislature and is fully answerable to it. The relationship is similar to a CEO and the board of directors - the CEO is just a regular company employee that the board has hired to run day-to-day operations.
In the US the president is directly elected, and while there are checks and balances in general the office of the president is completely independent of the legislature. There is a duty to uphold the laws of the US, but no real accountability for not doing so (other than impeachment).
The problem with Bush wasn't that he thumbed his nose at Congress so much as the fact that he was elected (twice!) in the first place. Like it or not more Americans supported him than opposed him (at least up until 2004). You can debate the 2000 election of course, but the fact is that even if he should have lost it would have only been by a slim margain. When a nation supports a president that uses his power in the way it was used, then there is little that can be done to stop it. Like it or not, he had the backing of the populace. Even with the abuses, there really wasn't enough popular support for an impeachment to make it happen. (Just look at how long it took to get rid of Gray Davis in a state known for political activism.)
Honestly, I think I'd prefer a parlimentary proporational democracy to what we have today. However, that isn't the nation we currently live in, and I don't see 3/4ths of the states voting for such a major overhaul of the constitution. So, we're stuck...
Yup. And it only scans the surface of whatever it is probing. So, go ahead and put that brain in a microtome first. Don't bother returning it when you're done with it... :)
He did point out this is an apples-to-oragnes comparison. The flight calculations considered only fuel. The IT calculations were wider in scope (power, manufacture, various infrastructure).
Airlines actually do not fly jets in the most fuel-efficient manner possible. There is a cost index calculation they perform that takes into account just about the entire airline infrastructure that dictates how they fly their planes. Flying slower saves fuel, but it costs more to pay the flight crew, increases time on the aircraft (maintenance and lifetime is based on hours of flight), and ties up the plane longer (which might in the aggregate require more planes to cover the routes). The result is they actually fly planes fairly close to their maximum speeds (the big exception would be on very long routes - where the added range could make the difference in needing one more leg). On a per-passenger basis an airliner is about as fuel-efficient as an SUV - so it shouldn't be surprising that fuel is only one of many costs that need to be considered.
I suspect that all those other costs also have substantial carbon footprints associated with them. I wouldn't be surprised if the fuel only represents maybe half of the carbon cost of a flight. It is just very dramatic to think about 50,000kgs of diesel going up in smoke.
Yeah, and it would probably only take six months of that before the HUGE number of people still left are survival experts extrodinaire.
You see, homo sapiens became the dominant species on the planet because of raw intelligence and the ability to communicate. Oh, sure, the random lion can outpower a human. However, anywhere humans settle you're not going to find wild lions running around. If lions are spotted there would be lots of yelling and shouting and then the lions would be carefully surrounded by 47 guys with spears and bows. More likely than not the lions wouldn't even try to get close - since their evolutionary adaptation is to know what looks like an easy meal and what doesn't.
Humans have been at the top of the food chain for certainly tens of thousands of years at least. Sure, the average american wouldn't be adept with a spear, but even a mentally retarded human has about a million times more learning capacity than just about any other animal out there.
No, if things got that desperate, it wouldn't be the animals we'd be looking out for. You'd see tribal warfare like you're never heard of with all those people fighting over so little food.
All of this is silly, however. The average westerner doesn't know how to hunt and fish because they've adapted to a completely different technology-based world. You'll never see humans give that up voluntarily. About the only thing I can think of that might lead to a hunter-gathering situation would be a full scale nuclear war.
I agree that it is better to treat problems at their root cause.
However, the same logic could be used to suggest that rather than having police lock up bank robbers, we should get rid of the incentive to rob banks. While abolishing money might get rid of robbery, it isn't a practical solution.
If somebody comes up with a practical way of making it unprofitable to be able to hijack 10 million desktop PCs then I'm all for it. However, ignoring practical solutions in favor of non-existant ones seems unwise.
Yeah, but if you do that then the botnet will be patched against the specific takedown code before it makes it through congressional committee.
What probably should happen is that some major world government (US, EU?) should decide that the botnet is a major headache and a threat to national security. Then the info warfare devision of the military would prepare a suitable script that would only disable the bots (perhaps installing a security patch on the way out to prevent reinfection).
Then they just do it. The operation would be classified and launched in a way that would be extremely difficult to trace.
All the pundits on the internet would cry about how horrible an action it was (though nobody would complain about the 95% reduction in spam). However, everybody would blame their favorite love-to-hate government (China, the US, France, whatever :)), while the folks in on the classified operation in the Netherlands laugh every time they get to work. And if by some miracle somebody actually figures out where it came from (large governments could just inject packets on any random telecom line, and even route them through tor if they want), what is anybody going to do about it? Launch a war on Belgium for ridding the world of spam? Levy economic sanctions for saving every company with an email server millions every year.
Big governments kill people all the time in the interest of public safety and security. What's the worse that could happen - a few million home PCs lock up from a poorly-designed script? That could already happen any day if one of Storm's owners makes a mistake.
I'm not big on government trespass on private property. However, if somebody's row home catches on fire and the owner refuses to let in those responsible for putting out the fire, then the police will simply put them in cuffs and let the firemen axe open the door. They might not do it for a single family home, but they'd not let a block go up in flames because some guy refused to cooperate.
If you want to be really nice about it then just put a public service annocement on TV stating that in the coming month the government is going to wipe out the Storm botnet, and that anybody who doesn't like the idea of having the government clean up their PC should opt out by removing their computer from the botnet in the next seven days...
From what I've read over the years getting rid of the SSMEs sounds like a big plus in terms of operational cost. Those engines are true technical marvels, but they are also extremely expensive to turnaround after each flight. They're reusable engines that cost almost as much to reuse as to build from scratch.
I don't profess to be qualified to truly evaluate the proposals on the merits. However I've been involved with large IT projects both on the inside and the outside. Sometimes the renegades are right, and sometimes they're wrong. Just because NASA has a history of blundering doesn't mean that any idea contraditory to something they come up with is a good one.
At work I'm beginning to sense the signs of all the infrastructure cuts (a fortune 500 company). It is getting to the point where I'm constantly getting conflicting meeting requests because free/busy data isn't updating quickly enough in Outlook (lots of people seem to have the problem). If I book a meeting it shows free for many hours. I suspect that somebody is doing the limbo on the number of exchange servers.
I'm all for cutting costs, but when it gets to the point where you get better service from hotmail you have to wonder...
Uh, you did catch the word "if" there, right?
IF they had too much demand then they should have raised prices.
IF they had too little demand then they should have lowered them (ie not charged $400 per laptop in first world nations).
I don't think they had too much demand - despite assertions to the contrary. How does a company with too much demand end up having mass layoffs? However, my point was that even IF (there's that word again) they had too much demand there was a better solution than "give-one-get-one".
Perhaps we're just talking past each other...
Yup. For this reason ext4 is the next big filesystem for linux, and btrfs will probably be next after that. At that point Sun doesn't really have much to offer since btrfs will do just about everything zfs does - zfs will just be what jfs is today - a great concept filesystem that nobody actually uses.
Don't get me wrong - zfs is great stuff. Granted, support for raid-z reshaping would be nice (adding to a raid, removing from a raid, etc - not just adding a new raid to an existing zpool). However, the license is going to end up killing it for linux use.
I never said they had trouble meeting the demand - that was a quotation.
I don't agree that they had trouble meeting the demand - that is my assertion. If they really had trouble with demand they should have raised prices in the first world while still abandoning the whole "give one get one" fiasco. Sure, they could use the profits to give away units, but that doesn't require a 100% markup.
If they're having so much trouble meeting demand, then why are they laying off half their staff?
Don't forget the live component. There is a big difference between a movie where you have 6-18 months to add in FX, and a TV broadcast which is at best delayed a few seconds. In a movie you can conceivably tweak your algorithms to catch the unexpected or clean up a few frames by hand if needed. With live the whole thing needs to work in realtime automatically.
Yeah - those evil people at the FCC might force poor people to have to choose between food and TV! Perish the thought!
They had trouble meeting the demand, much like Nintendo does with the Wii: Selling more to hose who don't need it would have made things worse, not better.
I have no issues with prioritzing 3rd world orders. However, it doesn't sound like they have trouble with meeting demand now - they have trouble meeting payroll. It hardly sounds like they have droves of people waiting for their product...
I think the attitude problem here is the guy who demands cheap toys and refuses to contribute to charity, not the guys who deny cheap toys to those who won't contribute to charity.
Ok, so their model is to sell $200 toys to people willing to give $200 to charity. Unfortunately there aren't many of the latter, so they ended up going out of business. You can complain that it is the fault of everybody who didn't pay $400 for a $200 laptop, and that's fine. But, it won't do anything to advance 3rd world education.
My point is that selling cheap toys to geeks would have done more to advance the needs of 3rd world children than being picky about who they sold their toys to. They could have made a profit on every sale, and used that to benefit children in the 3rd world. By being exclusive they basically just killed themselves.
If you want to advance the cause of charity then make it worth people's while. I give lots of money to charity. However, I can't give money to every charity on the planet. That isn't an attitude problem on my part - I earned my money and it isn't your perogative to critcize people for how they choose to give it (or not give it) away. When I see charities that have this kind of attitude I'm not inclined to donate - they simply dry up and then another charity with a more charitable attitude fills the void.
I think their holier-than-thou attitude is made particularly obvious from their whole "give-one-get-one" campaign. People who might have been willing to buy an XO for $200 were probably put off by the $400 price tag. If their goal was to increase volume to drive down cost then they should have pursued sales ANYWHERE they could get them. They could even charge a small markup in the first world and use that money towards 3rd-world effots. However, the 100% markup just priced them out of the first world market.
Their attitude seemed to be that we ought to be grateful for the opportunity to donate. My issue with that is that they chose to dicate the amount of contribution. That combined with the attitudes they seemed to come across with made me very hesitant to donate a dime to them.
Well, we see how well that worked out for them. They should have just sold them to anybody who would buy them. Then there would emerge a library of software and buzz that would have helped make the proejct more successful.
Of course, you could always just burn the fuel once in distributed reactors, and then re-burn it in more controlled centrallized reactors.
For all the wars that nuclear power would prevent (no fighting over oil) you'd think we could just garrison 1000 troops in every nuclear power plant. It isn't like some terrorist is going to break into an army base just to steam somewhat-enriched fuel (which is only one component of a bomb).
How hard can it be to secure a nuclear reactor? The closet one to me looks like it has a big permiter fence a good mile from the building. Nobody is going to just waltz into it.
Are you suggesting these guys should just fund their own lab for five years (employing who knows how many people) without a care for whether it will ever make money?
Sure, the government can afford to not worry about profit, but most other people who spend five years on something expect to get something out of it (like their costs for starters).
Unless you're of the mindset that all non-trivial research of any kind anywhere should be funded by taxpayers profitability is going to be a concern. And it isn't like making a profit costs the patients more - they're paying for the R&D one way or another (just via taxes instead of fees).
And who is to say that these guys even care about the money in the first place? Aiming to hit a particular price point is a goal in both the private and public sectors (why else would scientists dream about space elevators but for the possibility of making $1000 probles and launching one a week?).
Frankly - I don't want them to pay attention to details. That causes half the problems we have to deal with. I'd be happy if they just gave out performance evaluations and took the rest of the year off.
However, it would be nice if they pretended that they pay us to have minds and actually listen to our advice once in a while (without requiring us to spend 4 years salary on a big-5 firm to parrot our opinions).
But, how else are you going to get your fancy new Dell laptop to interface with a 1980s sync-on-green 17" 350lbs Sun console monitor? :)
That's why the 99.99999% of linux users who have VESA-compliant plug-and-play monitors manufactured in the last 25 years have configuration files that contain modelines.
I'm involved in a project at my place of employment that has brought in a big-5 consulting firm. I've never seen more beautiful powerpoint presentations in my life. Our group tells them what we want management to go for, and they prepare 15 slides with all the nice 3D shapes, interesting diagrams, etc to sell them on it. Management just eats this stuff up. We could probably get them to buy mortgage securities if we wanted to.
And THAT is why everybody spends so much time on presentation and not on content. The content just isn't important (although spending a lot of money on an opinion helps to make the content sound more important).
The problem is that there is no reason why the vast majority of http communications should be unencrypted as they are today. If you make the SSL verification standards even more stringent, then the cost of obtaining a certificate will raise to a point where SSL will only be used for the most critical functions. Stuff like gmail would be in the clear - which isn't appropriate.
If anything we need to make SSL certs EASIER to obtain, but better distinguish in their use. Even self-signed certs should be usable with browsers clearly explaining the limits of their security and not just flashing warning signs all over the place (which don't appear when not using SSL - even though plain http is even more vulnerable to attack than https using a self-signed certificate).
Yes, that is how it works TODAY. However, it would only take one bill passed by congress (think Patriot Act) to have the government just issue both keys. Don't worry - they'll only use the copy they keep for "important reasons."
Sure - when your threat model is somebody with the ability to intercept network traffic, but not modify it. In that threat model, an encrypted but unauthenticated transmission is secure. An unencrypted transmission is not secure.
And if an encrypted but unauthenticated and a non-encrypted connection are equally insecure, then why does firefox complain about the former and not the latter?
Don't get me wrong - I see the value in PKI and all that. However, the current SSL certificate issuance system is flawed - it is more a measure of willingness to pay cash and not authenticity. Granted, just charging money is going to defeat a number of attacks (you can no longer create millions or billions of attack domains with valid SSL certs). However, the status quo isn't exactly a bed of roses.
Encrypted communications should be the norm on the internet - nothing should be sent in the clear. Granted, I can make some allowance for devices that don't have sufficient CPU to perform AES, but over time that should dwindle. Authenticated communications may not be needed 100% of the time, but if somebody comes up with a good way to make it work I'd be happy to see every TCP packet encrypted and signed.