While a bash shell script is quite elegant, if you're looking for a decent cross-platform backup program, I recommend CrashPlan. The computer-to-computer and my_computer-to-my_friend's_computer features are good, as is their online storage. Saved my bacon (and my files!) when my laptop got stolen.
It's not perfect (nothing is), but it sucks less than the other programs I've seen. Works on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Solaris.
Er, wot? Home Depot, Lowes, and Best Buy all have recycling bins for CFLs. Since I'd be going to one of the former for replacements to any burnt-out bulbs, this isn't out of the way for me. How is that harder to dispose of?
Really? Around here (Tucson, AZ USA) CFLs at Home Depot are less than a dollar each in four-packs (It was something like $3.60/4 bulbs.). I'm not sure if they're more expensive than incandescents (as I've not priced incandescents in years), but they're certainly inexpensive enough that any price difference is trivial.
All of mine have lasted for years, give off less heat (less AC needed in the summer), and produce satisfactory light for reading and everyday indoor tasks. I don't do indoor photography or anything that requires super-accurate color rendering, but I'm not noticing any deficiencies in the light with just my eyes. With modern ballasts, they don't flicker and reach full brightness within about 5 seconds.
Short of extreme environments (outdoor lighting in Montana, oven lamps, etc.) and specific purposes (e.g. photography lamps, completely sealed enclosures, garage door openers, security lighting), I don't really see a purpose for incandescent bulbs.
What device do you use to detect very small pieces of glass, especially the clear kind from car headlights that often ends up on sidewalks after accidents?
More or less. That said, the "for life" shoes are made a bit more tough than the ordinary shoes. There's a thicker sole, different leather for the shoe, and what appears to be heavier stitching (I'm sure the website has all the details). I'm still on my first pair of them, and they seem to be lasting quite a bit longer than my previous shoes.
Even if I did need to replace them annually through the warranty (and, after about a year of owning them, it looks like it'd be far longer than that) I'd end up saving money rather than buying new shoes every year.
I suppose it's because they don't use artificial pesticides and the like on the cotton, which is intended to be better for the environment (not being an environmental scientist, I have no idea if this is actually the case). While it might not directly benefit the shoe-wearer, being able to have less of a personal impact on the environment seems like a reasonable benefit.
Sure, they're made in Thailand, but they've held up really well for me. Not like the cheaper Chinese ones. For $20 in shipping/handling, they'll replace them for life. Not a bad deal in my view.
The Vintage line of Doc Martens is still made in England. While not guaranteed for life, they're still better quality than the Chinese-made Docs.
What's the deal with all the scammy sites having the same 20-page-long main page layout? They all seem to have the same basic format, such as having random testimonials interspersed throughout, random bolded sections, etc. It comes across as the seedy late-night infomercial of the internet.
Is there some sort of "Make your own scam site!" template that's been going around for years? I can't believe that anyone has ever purchased anything from such a site, but I'm sure enough people have to make it worth their while.
Indeed. Perhaps I should have said "If one has a New York City office for their company...".
If one had an Albany office, why not use "nya.example.com" or some other descriptive text (like "albany.ny.example.com")?
My main point was that domains can trivially express organizational hierarchy. New TLDs are not required. Take, as an illustrative example, http://www.geico.jobs/ -- it re-directs to http://careers.geico.com/ . Is it really necessary to have an entire TLD for job-related sites (I'm assuming only the use of http in this example, rather than other services), when an organization could simply add a subdomain to their existing domain?
Encryption seems a bit more foolproof. It's also a bit more believable that one might "forget" a lengthy passphrase, while physical destruction looks a bit suspicious.
That said, encryption and physical destruction is also useful, as it means that even if someone gets some of the physical components of the disk, it will be even more difficult to get any data off of them.
I simply don't see why it's a bad thing to have the GAY Alliance have, for example, gayalliance.org. A gay dating website could have gaydating.com or something like that. Why is it necessary to add a whole new TLD?
Also, adding a new TLD specifically for gay-related things (much like.xxx for sex-related things) would make censorship that much easier.
Does anyone else thing it's rather silly that ICANN is seriously considering new, highly-specific TLDs?
For example, a.nyc TLD is rather silly, as one can already get example.ny.us domains. If one has a New York office for their company, why not simply set up a subdomain of nyc.example.com? That way the organizational hierarchy is preserved without needing additional TLDs.
The article also mentions that the dotGAY Initiative and the.GAY Alliance are looking to get a.gay TLD. Why? Why not get gayalliance.org, assuming they don't already have it?
I'm curious as to the utilization of the less-common TLDs like.info,.jobs,.museum, and so on. I can't imagine they're terribly useful; why would a company buy example.jobs rather than simply use jobs.example.com?
Sure, ICANN wants to make money and trademark holders would need to re-purchase their names in different TLDs, so I see the financial motivation to create new TLDs, but it still seems like a bad idea for the internet as a whole.
But what if the user mistyped their password that login? Then the next time they try to log in they might not be able to, then they might give up and go away and not place an order.
Briefly store the user-supplied until the authentication using the old method is successful, then use it to generate the new hashed password.
I just checked. Still happens there. I invest with Schwab, so this is a big deal to me.
I changed my Amazon password (hooray for 32-character random strings generated by and stored with LastPass) and that seems to have resolved it, but Schwab won't let me do anything yet. Amazingly insecure.
I thought the main issues weren't that the phone would try to communicate with several towers (the infrastructure already allows phones to work in multi-tower environments), but rather that (1) the antenna profiles of the towers were such that they focused most of their signal near the ground (where the customers are), rather than in the air, (2) phones used from planes need to switch towers very frequently (due to the high speed of the airplane), and (3) the transmission power of the phone is relatively low.
Forgive my second reply, but I failed to mention something in my previous post that is relevant: since Facebook already handles password logins over HTTPS, the heavy lifting (i.e. the RSA key exchange) is already taking place for every user. They can clearly handle that load. It's just that they're wasting those cycles by switching back to an insecure connection afterward.
Leaving the connection secure with a lightweight cipher like RC4 uses minimal additional resources, is extremely fast, and would be trivial to turn on.
Hardware costs would soar if they switched entirely to HTTPS. There is an entire industry making crypto co-processors to handle the load that millions of concurrent HTTPS connections place on an infrastructure.
SSL accelerators are useful for offloading the CPU-heavy part of the SSL transaction: the RSA key-exchange part. The rest of the secured connection is quite light, particularly when using a fast cipher like RC4. The RSA part can be sped up by using shorter keys (e.g. a 1024-bit key, rather than 2048 or 4096-bits), while still providing modest security (anything is better than nothing).
That this guy, a Google employee, said the following about SSL:
In January this year (2010), Gmail switched to using HTTPS for everything by default. Previously it had been introduced as an option, but now all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that.
If you stop reading now you only need to remember one thing: SSL/TLS is not computationally expensive any more.
Indeed. I believe their stream-to-PC service used to be WMV videos, which used Microsoft's DRM. I suppose it was considerably easier to just use Silverlight (which plays nice with the existing DRM) rather than re-encoding all the videos to a different codec.
Slashdot Mirror
While a bash shell script is quite elegant, if you're looking for a decent cross-platform backup program, I recommend CrashPlan. The computer-to-computer and my_computer-to-my_friend's_computer features are good, as is their online storage. Saved my bacon (and my files!) when my laptop got stolen.
It's not perfect (nothing is), but it sucks less than the other programs I've seen. Works on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Solaris.
harder to...dispose of
Er, wot? Home Depot, Lowes, and Best Buy all have recycling bins for CFLs. Since I'd be going to one of the former for replacements to any burnt-out bulbs, this isn't out of the way for me. How is that harder to dispose of?
No. It covers only incandescent light bulbs. Reptile heaters, heat lamps, etc. are not covered by this law.
From the summary:
CFLs are more expensive
Really? Around here (Tucson, AZ USA) CFLs at Home Depot are less than a dollar each in four-packs (It was something like $3.60/4 bulbs.). I'm not sure if they're more expensive than incandescents (as I've not priced incandescents in years), but they're certainly inexpensive enough that any price difference is trivial.
All of mine have lasted for years, give off less heat (less AC needed in the summer), and produce satisfactory light for reading and everyday indoor tasks. I don't do indoor photography or anything that requires super-accurate color rendering, but I'm not noticing any deficiencies in the light with just my eyes. With modern ballasts, they don't flicker and reach full brightness within about 5 seconds.
Short of extreme environments (outdoor lighting in Montana, oven lamps, etc.) and specific purposes (e.g. photography lamps, completely sealed enclosures, garage door openers, security lighting), I don't really see a purpose for incandescent bulbs.
What device do you use to detect very small pieces of glass, especially the clear kind from car headlights that often ends up on sidewalks after accidents?
Feet.
More or less. That said, the "for life" shoes are made a bit more tough than the ordinary shoes. There's a thicker sole, different leather for the shoe, and what appears to be heavier stitching (I'm sure the website has all the details). I'm still on my first pair of them, and they seem to be lasting quite a bit longer than my previous shoes.
Even if I did need to replace them annually through the warranty (and, after about a year of owning them, it looks like it'd be far longer than that) I'd end up saving money rather than buying new shoes every year.
I suppose it's because they don't use artificial pesticides and the like on the cotton, which is intended to be better for the environment (not being an environmental scientist, I have no idea if this is actually the case). While it might not directly benefit the shoe-wearer, being able to have less of a personal impact on the environment seems like a reasonable benefit.
How about the Doc Martens For Life shoes?
Sure, they're made in Thailand, but they've held up really well for me. Not like the cheaper Chinese ones. For $20 in shipping/handling, they'll replace them for life. Not a bad deal in my view.
The Vintage line of Doc Martens is still made in England. While not guaranteed for life, they're still better quality than the Chinese-made Docs.
What's the deal with all the scammy sites having the same 20-page-long main page layout? They all seem to have the same basic format, such as having random testimonials interspersed throughout, random bolded sections, etc. It comes across as the seedy late-night infomercial of the internet.
Is there some sort of "Make your own scam site!" template that's been going around for years? I can't believe that anyone has ever purchased anything from such a site, but I'm sure enough people have to make it worth their while.
It could be useful for people who are concerned about the future availability and cost of petroleum, which is just about everyone.
Indeed. Perhaps I should have said "If one has a New York City office for their company...".
If one had an Albany office, why not use "nya.example.com" or some other descriptive text (like "albany.ny.example.com")?
My main point was that domains can trivially express organizational hierarchy. New TLDs are not required. Take, as an illustrative example, http://www.geico.jobs/ -- it re-directs to http://careers.geico.com/ . Is it really necessary to have an entire TLD for job-related sites (I'm assuming only the use of http in this example, rather than other services), when an organization could simply add a subdomain to their existing domain?
Encryption seems a bit more foolproof. It's also a bit more believable that one might "forget" a lengthy passphrase, while physical destruction looks a bit suspicious.
That said, encryption and physical destruction is also useful, as it means that even if someone gets some of the physical components of the disk, it will be even more difficult to get any data off of them.
Because that would only work for one website?
So?
I simply don't see why it's a bad thing to have the GAY Alliance have, for example, gayalliance.org. A gay dating website could have gaydating.com or something like that. Why is it necessary to add a whole new TLD?
Also, adding a new TLD specifically for gay-related things (much like .xxx for sex-related things) would make censorship that much easier.
s/thing/think
Lack of coffee. Sorry.
Does anyone else thing it's rather silly that ICANN is seriously considering new, highly-specific TLDs?
For example, a .nyc TLD is rather silly, as one can already get example.ny.us domains. If one has a New York office for their company, why not simply set up a subdomain of nyc.example.com? That way the organizational hierarchy is preserved without needing additional TLDs.
The article also mentions that the dotGAY Initiative and the .GAY Alliance are looking to get a .gay TLD. Why? Why not get gayalliance.org, assuming they don't already have it?
I'm curious as to the utilization of the less-common TLDs like .info, .jobs, .museum, and so on. I can't imagine they're terribly useful; why would a company buy example.jobs rather than simply use jobs.example.com?
Sure, ICANN wants to make money and trademark holders would need to re-purchase their names in different TLDs, so I see the financial motivation to create new TLDs, but it still seems like a bad idea for the internet as a whole.
Er...that was supposed to be quoting the AC's text on the first line, but I borked it. Sorry.
But what if the user mistyped their password that login? Then the next time they try to log in they might not be able to, then they might give up and go away and not place an order.
Briefly store the user-supplied until the authentication using the old method is successful, then use it to generate the new hashed password.
I just checked. Still happens there. I invest with Schwab, so this is a big deal to me.
I changed my Amazon password (hooray for 32-character random strings generated by and stored with LastPass) and that seems to have resolved it, but Schwab won't let me do anything yet. Amazingly insecure.
I just recalled that Charles Schwab (a US stockbroker company) has an 8-character password limit.
Guess what? They're also affected by the same issue.
Crap.
I thought the main issues weren't that the phone would try to communicate with several towers (the infrastructure already allows phones to work in multi-tower environments), but rather that (1) the antenna profiles of the towers were such that they focused most of their signal near the ground (where the customers are), rather than in the air, (2) phones used from planes need to switch towers very frequently (due to the high speed of the airplane), and (3) the transmission power of the phone is relatively low.
Forgive my second reply, but I failed to mention something in my previous post that is relevant: since Facebook already handles password logins over HTTPS, the heavy lifting (i.e. the RSA key exchange) is already taking place for every user. They can clearly handle that load. It's just that they're wasting those cycles by switching back to an insecure connection afterward.
Leaving the connection secure with a lightweight cipher like RC4 uses minimal additional resources, is extremely fast, and would be trivial to turn on.
Hardware costs would soar if they switched entirely to HTTPS. There is an entire industry making crypto co-processors to handle the load that millions of concurrent HTTPS connections place on an infrastructure.
SSL accelerators are useful for offloading the CPU-heavy part of the SSL transaction: the RSA key-exchange part. The rest of the secured connection is quite light, particularly when using a fast cipher like RC4. The RSA part can be sped up by using shorter keys (e.g. a 1024-bit key, rather than 2048 or 4096-bits), while still providing modest security (anything is better than nothing).
That this guy, a Google employee, said the following about SSL:
In January this year (2010), Gmail switched to using HTTPS for everything by default. Previously it had been introduced as an option, but now all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that.
If you stop reading now you only need to remember one thing: SSL/TLS is not computationally expensive any more.
Indeed. I believe their stream-to-PC service used to be WMV videos, which used Microsoft's DRM. I suppose it was considerably easier to just use Silverlight (which plays nice with the existing DRM) rather than re-encoding all the videos to a different codec.
Its already known that there is a US Gov backdoor in gmail.
[citation needed]
I mis-parsed your first sentence as "digesting old books", and was alarmed for a moment.
Digitizing? Carry on, then.