I don't have a problem with your overall point, but you can't deny that the FHS layout is needlessly complicated for almost every desktop/workstation and even the vast majority of servers. There's no need for more than a half dozen places to put binaries (including libraries). Everything relating to/opt/ seems entirely pointless. Root's home is separate from the main/home/ for valid technical reasons, but for consistency it would make sense if it at least appeared to be within/home/ and didn't show up directly under the root. I could go on but it's late and I have to get up for work in a few hours.
Don't change for the sake of change of course, but at the same time don't act like what we have is perfect. What we have was built around the way old Unix was used, not how the vast majority of *nixes are used today. We don't need every system to be built with the expectation that it's going to be split up among multiple volumes and partially on shared filesystems that may or may not be the same architecture because the vast majority will not, no matter what class of hardware we're talking about. Those who need that can set their stuff up that way, the rest of us would benefit from a simpler layout.
The Autobahn is a great counter-example though. It has one of the lowest rates of both accidents and fatalities per mile traveled, and has no speed limits at all in many sections. It's not the speed that kills, it's the bad situations caused when you mix speed differences with inattentive drivers.
Speed cameras "work" because they reduce one side of the speed difference problem. Unfortunately minimum speeds are rarely enforced and even where they are it's so low that even the bluehairs rarely go that slow.
Combine better driver training and licensing with strict enforcement of proper lane usage like the Germans do and we can see similar results to what they got without crippling our highways with silly speed limits.
We should want our highways going faster and work toward that. Get those who can barely drive off the road (if you can't handle 80+ MPH, you can't drive, period), get unsafe vehicles off the road (you have no idea how often I see vehicles with nearly bald tires in the winter in Ohio), and enforce proper lane discipline.
Seems like a very complicated way to collect taxes.
A useful application would be to target those vehicles which are going more than 10% (or 10km/h or whatever) slower than everyone else. That would actually improve safety and make the highway system more efficient (homogenous traffic reduces braking/lane changes and increases throughput). However, that's not the primary goal of highway speed enforcement so it will never happen
It works just as well with my change. The problem is not speed itself, but differences in speed. Assuming a 65 MPH speed limit, Granny Bluehair going 43 MPH in the left lane is just as bad as if not worse than me doing 85. At least I'm paying attention to the road and able to react rapidly to anything that may happen.
Modern cars and roads are perfectly safe at triple-digit speeds. Limits are kept as low as they are for two reasons, revenue collection and the fact that our licensing and vehicle safety requirements in this country are practically pointless. Prevent municipalities from benefiting from speeding tickets in any way and watch speed traps disappear. The harder part is getting people to accept that driving is a privilege, not a right, and if you can't keep a good set of tires on your vehicle that is appropriate for the weather, you don't get to drive.
You have another choice when it comes to trains in almost all cases. There are few places you can ride a train to which you can not also drive to. If we limit it just to the US as he does in that statement, I don't believe there is anywhere accessible by train but not car which you would not have to be identified to enter anyways.
There's always a point where moral choices like that run in to practicality. He used non-free software, OSes, and devices until options that suited his desires were available. I read this statement as saying that when available, he will choose the transportation method which does not require identification. I would assume then that he only flies when crossing oceans, in which case he'd almost always need to identify himself at Customs anyways thus defeating the point of caring if he was identified before boarding.
He also refuses to have a cell phone because "they are tracking and surveillance devices" and "most of them are computers with nonfree software installed". Except if he needs to make a call, he has no problem borrowing someone else's.
Using someone else's phone eliminates any legitimate concern about tracking and surveillance, unless those tracking you are tapping every single phone in the area they think you're in and listening for your voice. If that was the case you're stuck if you need to make a call at all, cellular or not.
The second part is true, though that technically can be avoided today if one's willing to put up with a lot of pain to use it through phones like the OpenMoko running OsmocomBB on the cellular baseband processor. OpenMoko's UI is not great and OsmocomBB doesn't have much functionality though, so you end up with a device that has hardware comparable to a first-generation Android device but functionality comparable to early prototype GSM handsets.
I wonder if RMS drives a car with modern fuel injection. Those tend to use proprietary RTOSes, and even the open source Megasquirt is most certainly not Free Software.
No it doesn't, not even a little. There is nothing that prevents any form of OSS from existing on the AppStore except perhaps some retarded interpretation of GPL.
Not entirely correct. Distribution of GPL code for which you do not own the copyright on an app store for a locked down platform such as the official iOS App Store is at best a grey area under GPLv2 and I believe plain illegal under GPLv3 as the user can not just download the source and build a working version for their device. To my knowledge this is why VLC was pulled for example. It was by request of a VLC copyright holder, not Apple.
This limitation does not apply to app stores which are not the sole source of binaries for the platform such as the jailbreak app stores on iOS and the many Android options, as those users are able to compile and load their own binaries as they please. This would also be the case IMO for the Mac App Store, as you could still download the Growl code and build it yourself with Xcode same as always.
Going on top of that, the actual copyright owners... the ONLY ones who can make it closed source... can also make an exception or special license to deal with the AppStore, like 'its GPL for everyone outside of our organization, and we'll do whatever the fuck with it internally because well, we can'.
Again, licensing isn't even a little bit confusing or difficult to understand unless you're trying to make it into something its not.
This part you got completely right, if the Growl team requires contributors to assign copyright to the team or all the contributors agree, they can license the App Store version however they want.
tl;dr: If you're building from someone else's GPL code, closed app stores _might_ be a problem, though historically this has only come up if one of the copyright holders has a problem with the app store. If you own the copyright, do whatever you feel like.
Obviously in this situation since they're able to relicense to closed, this has nothing to do with the app store and everything to do with making money.
I have a test machine currently triple-booting the 8 DP, 7, and XP.
Right now what it does in the developer preview is it boots in to the Windows 8 loader, then if you select the "Windows 7" entry it sits for a bit and reboots the computer. When it reboots it jumps directly in to Windows 7. If I reboot from there I get the Windows Vista/7 style loader with three options, "Windows Developer Preview", "Windows 7", and "Previous version of Windows".
I expect that the well-known tricks for booting Linux from the Windows 7 loader will continue to work just fine.
I predict that, one day, the king of "most downloaded" torrents will be a 3D printer file for a bong.
Smoking directly from plastic is a bad idea for obvious reasons, so until we can 3D print glass or metal for the bowl and downstem a 3D printed bong would be incomplete. I know this bit was likely sort of a joke, but I had to say it.
But I am also the same guy who wonders why if I can have a qHD display in a 4" cell phone, why can't I have a 4K display in my 17" laptop...
I'm also that guy. It pisses me off so much that in 2004 I was able to spec a laptop with a 15" 1920x1200 display for under $1500, yet still today in 2011 if I want that resolution or greater in a desktop display I need to either find the rare 20-22" units in that range or get a 24".
I know what you're talking about as I have heard of doing it in NT4/2K, but I can say for certain that I did not have to do that in either XP or Vista when I upgraded from an Athlon 64 3200+ to an Athlon X2 3800+. Every computer I've worked on since then has been multicore, so I don't know if I just got lucky or what, but it just worked.
Also, at this point I don't think anyone cares anymore, it's unreasonable to expect such an update for old OSes and no one has to worry about this on new builds since only the lowest of the low end netbook/top CPUs are single core anymore (and at least Intel's has Hyperthreading which results in the SMP kernel being used anyways).
Now if you accidentally install a machine with your BIOS set to emulate IDE on the SATA ports and want to switch it to proper AHCI mode, you're in for a world of hurt. Supposedly that can be fixed by a procedure similar to the SMP switch on Win2K, but I never got it to work and have reinstalled two freshly built machines recently because some BIOSes are stupidly set in that mode.
Unfortunately most Android device manufacturers have stupidly decided to put a nearly useless amount of internal flash ROM in their phones and then try to balance it by including a decent sized but typically crappy and slow microSD card. My Evo has 512MB of ROM, of which about half of that is available for use on a stock CyanogenMod install (HTC's OEM "SenseUI" ROM is even worse). Some Android apps can't run off SD through the Google official method and others don't run well, but if you have a modded ROM installed you can usually use "Apps2SD" which involves creating another partition on your SD card and mounting it in such a way that the phone thinks it's part of the internal storage.
That's why I use a VPN and/or SSL encrypted connections on my Android and iPhone. Secure encrypted communication, and I'm not stuck dealing with an e-mail device that's been bodged in to trying to be a smartphone which pointlessly runs everything through RIM's servers. How many times has a server outage disabled functionality on every Blackberry again?
Still not as universal and easy to use as SMB. Neither OS X nor Windows' built-in GUI FTP clients are particularly useful (OS X's is read-only for some reason) and neither of those protocols have autodiscovery. If I open up the network browser on any of my machines, SMB shares are the only ones that will show up on all of 'em. Obviously the Macs also see AFP shares and if I have Avahi set up right it's possible to make WebDAV show up in Windows and Linux.
Again it's about simplicity and universality. Both major commercial OSes and all desktop-focused *nix distros have SMB clients and servers built in out of the box, so that's the best choice for my situation.
Is there any reason to move back? or light up a new Samba so I could.... ummm
There are two reasons I continue to use Samba: laziness and it "just works" (for most definitions of "works"). Every single even remotely common personal computing platform has a SMB client either built in or readily available. This means that alternatives can't just be equal, they have to be better enough that it justifies the effort involved in installing and configuring the relevant client software rather than just clicking a few buttons and picking the share(s) you want to access.
To directly answer your question, the reason I'd bring back Samba (note, I am not saying to leave AFS but to use it alongside like you already are with netatalk) would be to be able to easily access data from any random computer you may bring on to the network, regardless of operating system, usually without any software installation.
On my home network it's not uncommon for friends to bring their computers over to leech off my 50m internet and get files from my media server, so simple universal guest support is a major thing.
You have to be blind if you consider Squirrelmail anywhere close to comparable to a modern interface like Gmail. It pretty much embodies the visual style of '90s Perl scripts, and that's certainly not a good thing.
This neglects the reality that even with zero turn mowers, there is some cost to turning. You can't make a right angle turn at full speed. There isn't a mathematically correct solution unless you correctly model the costs of turning.
This is already covered. One of the first things pointed out is that less turning means less overlap, so they're already aiming to reduce how much you have to turn.
If you're doing it 'by hand' - then you also need to model the cost of screwing up. It may be that comparatively simple schemes - such as an interleaved raster scan may be in practice optimal for a human to mow it.
If we assume the pattern shown to be similar to those that would be generated for other mowing areas, the complexity is in the center. The rest is pretty much riding a smoothed version of the edge and then doing a few laps. As the complex center is only a few blade widths across, the mistake cost is minimal as you're still right in the area and you're nearly done.
That said I'd bet you're right for a push mower. As long as there's minimal overlap I can't see significant room for improvement from any pattern as turns are not particularly hard while moving at a walking pace. On a ZTR, the speed loss from a corner is entirely dependent on how tight the corner was, so straighter is better. On a tractor, to a point there's almost no cost to turns as long as the radius is not too tight. I've never seen a lawn tractor that couldn't corner as tight as it can at full speed, but the problem is they can only turn so tight before it becomes a multi-point turn or you have to swing wide and loop around. The back-and-forth pattern is terrible with these for that reason.
Correct. It's not competition for the incumbents, it's a good way to service those who the incumbents don't find worthy. Some of the public documents indicate an intended per-user bandwidth of 1.5m down and somewhere around 384k up, so it's comparable to long-range DSL, 3G cellular, or home satellite in that way.
I used to live in the middle of nowhere about 32,000 feet from the CO according to Verizon. I officially had 3/768 speeds on my DSL, but it never once synced faster than 864/512 and was usually unreliable even at that. Since living in a rural area meant I already had a TV antenna, I'd gladly have thrown another one up to get a connection which was more reliable by not being dependent on ancient wires running alongside country roads.
What kind of output will your home antenna need to reach back to a tower that's 50 miles away?
Four watts, according to this IEEE presentation (PDF). Page seven shows that the intended use is with a range of 10-30km, four watts from both ends (though other documents indicate that outside of the US the base stations may be allowed up to 100 watts). The 100km range quoted in this article is listed as "exceptionally, under favorable conditions". The customer end would also be using a directional antenna mounted at minimum 10 meters above the ground, so basically this is comparable with legal home CB operation. Almost any amateur radio operator in similar frequencies and a large number of CB operators (though illegally in their case) run many times this level of power.
I think the article mentions that the only drawback is the wrong caller-id info, but if memory serves caller-id can be faked on the fixed phone network. I believe it has been ruled illegal, but guess how effective that would be to stop this hack.
It's trivial for anyone with a VoIP line or ISDN/T1 to send whatever number they want with a call, so if their carrier will accept and pass it along it'll reach the other end without trouble. Some carriers block sending any numbers which are not associated with the customer, but this is uncommon in my experience outside of residential-focused providers.
I disagree. The issues are real, but many question the threat posed by them. A few bored hackers building a proof-of-concept in their garage provides undeniable proof that not only is the threat real but it's well within the reach of anyone who cares to try.
The problem you describe is caused by exactly the thing they're trying to solve here. Corporate users are stupid and think that deployment strategies which worked 10 years ago still make sense. Anything that touches the internet needs to be able to be updated rapidly, so the corporate "this version is the version we use for the next five years" idea needs to go away.
If you have a web app you consider critical, testing it against a browser version is fucking retarded. Test it against standards, or failing that at least test it in multiple current-generation browsers. If it's good in either of those cases, you can feel comfortable that it won't be broken by a browser update, which then means you won't be risking your data security and pissing off web developers by dragging around shitty old browsers.
As far as I'm concerned, IE8 is the oldest browser that anyone should care about. If you can't at least get to that, you are doing it wrong.
Debian GNU/Hurd does not yet have a working graphical desktop environment. GNU Hurd is reported to work with an old XFree86 release, but not yet X.Org nor to mention the only very antiquated hardware support.
So yes, X11 works, just not a version anyone gives a shit about.
I think you're on the nose. I knew the area as "GTE North" and yea, they sold it off to Frontier a few years ago after teasing us with a test-market of FiOS in a few small towns. I'm glad to have moved to a larger town where the LEC is still Frontier, but the cable options aren't shit (50/5 truly unlimited with no complaints from the ISP when I use 2TB in a month for $129) so their offerings are pretty much irrelevant. The cable company has a nice cheap tier, so no one gets DSL unless they don't know any better.
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I don't have a problem with your overall point, but you can't deny that the FHS layout is needlessly complicated for almost every desktop/workstation and even the vast majority of servers. There's no need for more than a half dozen places to put binaries (including libraries). Everything relating to /opt/ seems entirely pointless. Root's home is separate from the main /home/ for valid technical reasons, but for consistency it would make sense if it at least appeared to be within /home/ and didn't show up directly under the root. I could go on but it's late and I have to get up for work in a few hours.
Don't change for the sake of change of course, but at the same time don't act like what we have is perfect. What we have was built around the way old Unix was used, not how the vast majority of *nixes are used today. We don't need every system to be built with the expectation that it's going to be split up among multiple volumes and partially on shared filesystems that may or may not be the same architecture because the vast majority will not, no matter what class of hardware we're talking about. Those who need that can set their stuff up that way, the rest of us would benefit from a simpler layout.
The Autobahn is a great counter-example though. It has one of the lowest rates of both accidents and fatalities per mile traveled, and has no speed limits at all in many sections. It's not the speed that kills, it's the bad situations caused when you mix speed differences with inattentive drivers.
Speed cameras "work" because they reduce one side of the speed difference problem. Unfortunately minimum speeds are rarely enforced and even where they are it's so low that even the bluehairs rarely go that slow.
Combine better driver training and licensing with strict enforcement of proper lane usage like the Germans do and we can see similar results to what they got without crippling our highways with silly speed limits.
We should want our highways going faster and work toward that. Get those who can barely drive off the road (if you can't handle 80+ MPH, you can't drive, period), get unsafe vehicles off the road (you have no idea how often I see vehicles with nearly bald tires in the winter in Ohio), and enforce proper lane discipline.
Seems like a very complicated way to collect taxes.
A useful application would be to target those vehicles which are going more than 10% (or 10km/h or whatever) slower than everyone else. That would actually improve safety and make the highway system more efficient (homogenous traffic reduces braking/lane changes and increases throughput). However, that's not the primary goal of highway speed enforcement so it will never happen
It works just as well with my change. The problem is not speed itself, but differences in speed. Assuming a 65 MPH speed limit, Granny Bluehair going 43 MPH in the left lane is just as bad as if not worse than me doing 85. At least I'm paying attention to the road and able to react rapidly to anything that may happen.
Modern cars and roads are perfectly safe at triple-digit speeds. Limits are kept as low as they are for two reasons, revenue collection and the fact that our licensing and vehicle safety requirements in this country are practically pointless. Prevent municipalities from benefiting from speeding tickets in any way and watch speed traps disappear. The harder part is getting people to accept that driving is a privilege, not a right, and if you can't keep a good set of tires on your vehicle that is appropriate for the weather, you don't get to drive.
And yet he's fine with planes...
You have another choice when it comes to trains in almost all cases. There are few places you can ride a train to which you can not also drive to. If we limit it just to the US as he does in that statement, I don't believe there is anywhere accessible by train but not car which you would not have to be identified to enter anyways.
There's always a point where moral choices like that run in to practicality. He used non-free software, OSes, and devices until options that suited his desires were available. I read this statement as saying that when available, he will choose the transportation method which does not require identification. I would assume then that he only flies when crossing oceans, in which case he'd almost always need to identify himself at Customs anyways thus defeating the point of caring if he was identified before boarding.
He also refuses to have a cell phone because "they are tracking and surveillance devices" and "most of them are computers with nonfree software installed". Except if he needs to make a call, he has no problem borrowing someone else's.
Using someone else's phone eliminates any legitimate concern about tracking and surveillance, unless those tracking you are tapping every single phone in the area they think you're in and listening for your voice. If that was the case you're stuck if you need to make a call at all, cellular or not.
The second part is true, though that technically can be avoided today if one's willing to put up with a lot of pain to use it through phones like the OpenMoko running OsmocomBB on the cellular baseband processor. OpenMoko's UI is not great and OsmocomBB doesn't have much functionality though, so you end up with a device that has hardware comparable to a first-generation Android device but functionality comparable to early prototype GSM handsets.
I wonder if RMS drives a car with modern fuel injection. Those tend to use proprietary RTOSes, and even the open source Megasquirt is most certainly not Free Software.
No it doesn't, not even a little. There is nothing that prevents any form of OSS from existing on the AppStore except perhaps some retarded interpretation of GPL.
Not entirely correct. Distribution of GPL code for which you do not own the copyright on an app store for a locked down platform such as the official iOS App Store is at best a grey area under GPLv2 and I believe plain illegal under GPLv3 as the user can not just download the source and build a working version for their device. To my knowledge this is why VLC was pulled for example. It was by request of a VLC copyright holder, not Apple.
This limitation does not apply to app stores which are not the sole source of binaries for the platform such as the jailbreak app stores on iOS and the many Android options, as those users are able to compile and load their own binaries as they please. This would also be the case IMO for the Mac App Store, as you could still download the Growl code and build it yourself with Xcode same as always.
Going on top of that, the actual copyright owners ... the ONLY ones who can make it closed source ... can also make an exception or special license to deal with the AppStore, like 'its GPL for everyone outside of our organization, and we'll do whatever the fuck with it internally because well, we can'.
Again, licensing isn't even a little bit confusing or difficult to understand unless you're trying to make it into something its not.
This part you got completely right, if the Growl team requires contributors to assign copyright to the team or all the contributors agree, they can license the App Store version however they want.
tl;dr: If you're building from someone else's GPL code, closed app stores _might_ be a problem, though historically this has only come up if one of the copyright holders has a problem with the app store. If you own the copyright, do whatever you feel like.
Obviously in this situation since they're able to relicense to closed, this has nothing to do with the app store and everything to do with making money.
I have a test machine currently triple-booting the 8 DP, 7, and XP.
Right now what it does in the developer preview is it boots in to the Windows 8 loader, then if you select the "Windows 7" entry it sits for a bit and reboots the computer. When it reboots it jumps directly in to Windows 7. If I reboot from there I get the Windows Vista/7 style loader with three options, "Windows Developer Preview", "Windows 7", and "Previous version of Windows".
I expect that the well-known tricks for booting Linux from the Windows 7 loader will continue to work just fine.
I predict that, one day, the king of "most downloaded" torrents will be a 3D printer file for a bong.
Smoking directly from plastic is a bad idea for obvious reasons, so until we can 3D print glass or metal for the bowl and downstem a 3D printed bong would be incomplete. I know this bit was likely sort of a joke, but I had to say it.
But I am also the same guy who wonders why if I can have a qHD display in a 4" cell phone, why can't I have a 4K display in my 17" laptop...
I'm also that guy. It pisses me off so much that in 2004 I was able to spec a laptop with a 15" 1920x1200 display for under $1500, yet still today in 2011 if I want that resolution or greater in a desktop display I need to either find the rare 20-22" units in that range or get a 24".
I know what you're talking about as I have heard of doing it in NT4/2K, but I can say for certain that I did not have to do that in either XP or Vista when I upgraded from an Athlon 64 3200+ to an Athlon X2 3800+. Every computer I've worked on since then has been multicore, so I don't know if I just got lucky or what, but it just worked.
Also, at this point I don't think anyone cares anymore, it's unreasonable to expect such an update for old OSes and no one has to worry about this on new builds since only the lowest of the low end netbook/top CPUs are single core anymore (and at least Intel's has Hyperthreading which results in the SMP kernel being used anyways).
Now if you accidentally install a machine with your BIOS set to emulate IDE on the SATA ports and want to switch it to proper AHCI mode, you're in for a world of hurt. Supposedly that can be fixed by a procedure similar to the SMP switch on Win2K, but I never got it to work and have reinstalled two freshly built machines recently because some BIOSes are stupidly set in that mode.
Unfortunately most Android device manufacturers have stupidly decided to put a nearly useless amount of internal flash ROM in their phones and then try to balance it by including a decent sized but typically crappy and slow microSD card. My Evo has 512MB of ROM, of which about half of that is available for use on a stock CyanogenMod install (HTC's OEM "SenseUI" ROM is even worse). Some Android apps can't run off SD through the Google official method and others don't run well, but if you have a modded ROM installed you can usually use "Apps2SD" which involves creating another partition on your SD card and mounting it in such a way that the phone thinks it's part of the internal storage.
That's why I use a VPN and/or SSL encrypted connections on my Android and iPhone. Secure encrypted communication, and I'm not stuck dealing with an e-mail device that's been bodged in to trying to be a smartphone which pointlessly runs everything through RIM's servers. How many times has a server outage disabled functionality on every Blackberry again?
Still not as universal and easy to use as SMB. Neither OS X nor Windows' built-in GUI FTP clients are particularly useful (OS X's is read-only for some reason) and neither of those protocols have autodiscovery. If I open up the network browser on any of my machines, SMB shares are the only ones that will show up on all of 'em. Obviously the Macs also see AFP shares and if I have Avahi set up right it's possible to make WebDAV show up in Windows and Linux.
Again it's about simplicity and universality. Both major commercial OSes and all desktop-focused *nix distros have SMB clients and servers built in out of the box, so that's the best choice for my situation.
Is there any reason to move back? or light up a new Samba so I could.... ummm
There are two reasons I continue to use Samba: laziness and it "just works" (for most definitions of "works"). Every single even remotely common personal computing platform has a SMB client either built in or readily available. This means that alternatives can't just be equal, they have to be better enough that it justifies the effort involved in installing and configuring the relevant client software rather than just clicking a few buttons and picking the share(s) you want to access.
To directly answer your question, the reason I'd bring back Samba (note, I am not saying to leave AFS but to use it alongside like you already are with netatalk) would be to be able to easily access data from any random computer you may bring on to the network, regardless of operating system, usually without any software installation.
On my home network it's not uncommon for friends to bring their computers over to leech off my 50m internet and get files from my media server, so simple universal guest support is a major thing.
no, wait, Android devices don't let you access root so easily either.
The Nexus One, Nexus S, Xoom, and Altrix among others beg to differ. By the end of the month the Sensation and Evo 3D will have joined the crowd.
You have to be blind if you consider Squirrelmail anywhere close to comparable to a modern interface like Gmail. It pretty much embodies the visual style of '90s Perl scripts, and that's certainly not a good thing.
The best webmail UI I've used other than Gmail is Roundcube. It's simple, clean, and works quite well.
This neglects the reality that even with zero turn mowers, there is some cost to turning.
You can't make a right angle turn at full speed.
There isn't a mathematically correct solution unless you correctly model the costs of turning.
This is already covered. One of the first things pointed out is that less turning means less overlap, so they're already aiming to reduce how much you have to turn.
If you're doing it 'by hand' - then you also need to model the cost of screwing up.
It may be that comparatively simple schemes - such as an interleaved raster scan may be
in practice optimal for a human to mow it.
If we assume the pattern shown to be similar to those that would be generated for other mowing areas, the complexity is in the center. The rest is pretty much riding a smoothed version of the edge and then doing a few laps. As the complex center is only a few blade widths across, the mistake cost is minimal as you're still right in the area and you're nearly done.
That said I'd bet you're right for a push mower. As long as there's minimal overlap I can't see significant room for improvement from any pattern as turns are not particularly hard while moving at a walking pace. On a ZTR, the speed loss from a corner is entirely dependent on how tight the corner was, so straighter is better. On a tractor, to a point there's almost no cost to turns as long as the radius is not too tight. I've never seen a lawn tractor that couldn't corner as tight as it can at full speed, but the problem is they can only turn so tight before it becomes a multi-point turn or you have to swing wide and loop around. The back-and-forth pattern is terrible with these for that reason.
Correct. It's not competition for the incumbents, it's a good way to service those who the incumbents don't find worthy. Some of the public documents indicate an intended per-user bandwidth of 1.5m down and somewhere around 384k up, so it's comparable to long-range DSL, 3G cellular, or home satellite in that way.
I used to live in the middle of nowhere about 32,000 feet from the CO according to Verizon. I officially had 3/768 speeds on my DSL, but it never once synced faster than 864/512 and was usually unreliable even at that. Since living in a rural area meant I already had a TV antenna, I'd gladly have thrown another one up to get a connection which was more reliable by not being dependent on ancient wires running alongside country roads.
What kind of output will your home antenna need to reach back to a tower that's 50 miles away?
Four watts, according to this IEEE presentation (PDF). Page seven shows that the intended use is with a range of 10-30km, four watts from both ends (though other documents indicate that outside of the US the base stations may be allowed up to 100 watts). The 100km range quoted in this article is listed as "exceptionally, under favorable conditions". The customer end would also be using a directional antenna mounted at minimum 10 meters above the ground, so basically this is comparable with legal home CB operation. Almost any amateur radio operator in similar frequencies and a large number of CB operators (though illegally in their case) run many times this level of power.
I think the article mentions that the only drawback is the wrong caller-id info, but if memory serves caller-id can be faked on the fixed phone network. I believe it has been ruled illegal, but guess how effective that would be to stop this hack.
It's trivial for anyone with a VoIP line or ISDN/T1 to send whatever number they want with a call, so if their carrier will accept and pass it along it'll reach the other end without trouble. Some carriers block sending any numbers which are not associated with the customer, but this is uncommon in my experience outside of residential-focused providers.
I disagree. The issues are real, but many question the threat posed by them. A few bored hackers building a proof-of-concept in their garage provides undeniable proof that not only is the threat real but it's well within the reach of anyone who cares to try.
The problem you describe is caused by exactly the thing they're trying to solve here. Corporate users are stupid and think that deployment strategies which worked 10 years ago still make sense. Anything that touches the internet needs to be able to be updated rapidly, so the corporate "this version is the version we use for the next five years" idea needs to go away.
If you have a web app you consider critical, testing it against a browser version is fucking retarded. Test it against standards, or failing that at least test it in multiple current-generation browsers. If it's good in either of those cases, you can feel comfortable that it won't be broken by a browser update, which then means you won't be risking your data security and pissing off web developers by dragging around shitty old browsers.
As far as I'm concerned, IE8 is the oldest browser that anyone should care about. If you can't at least get to that, you are doing it wrong.
Debian GNU/Hurd does not yet have a working graphical desktop environment. GNU Hurd is reported to work with an old XFree86 release, but not yet X.Org nor to mention the only very antiquated hardware support.
So yes, X11 works, just not a version anyone gives a shit about.
I think you're on the nose. I knew the area as "GTE North" and yea, they sold it off to Frontier a few years ago after teasing us with a test-market of FiOS in a few small towns. I'm glad to have moved to a larger town where the LEC is still Frontier, but the cable options aren't shit (50/5 truly unlimited with no complaints from the ISP when I use 2TB in a month for $129) so their offerings are pretty much irrelevant. The cable company has a nice cheap tier, so no one gets DSL unless they don't know any better.