I can see the small utility app market having a market correction, since a lot of those are fairly overpriced on the Mac platform compared to their counterparts on other platforms, but aside from those and possibly games of the same class as a smartphone game I wouldn't expect much change. Steam's been out for years and has millions of satisfied users, yet all the titles on it have regular prices within $10 of, if not matching, retail. They tend to go on sale more often and with deeper discounts, but that's in my opinion more related to the significantly reduced overhead of online versus retail allowing for much greater dips while maintaining the same profit margin.
Basically anything that is significantly impacted price-wise by the App Store was likely overpriced to begin with.
Nobody wants to expose all their internal addresses. Period. Which part of that can you dumb fucks not understand? No organisation is going to want to implement that.
1. Deny all default inbound rule on the firewall. Done. Same level of security as NAT.
2. There are still link-local addresses if you want to configure machines or services to be local-only.
NAT is a bad thing. It's a hack to resolve a problem (limited IPs) that IPv6 eliminates, so get rid of it.
I feel exactly the same. I'm a bit of a communications geek so if there were any way for me to have a satellite phone which wouldn't be a total waste of money I'd have one by now. Unfortunately as you mention every prepaid plan expires the minutes very soon and the most basic service otherwise costs more than my nicely-featured smartphone without even including any actual usage.
If the satphone providers would offer an "emergency phone" package where I could pick up a used phone and have a small set of minutes (10-15 would seem to be sufficient for the purpose) that don't ever expire (or at least have an expiration time measured in multiple years) I'd certainly pick one up and keep it in my travel emergency kit. I could even understand a few bucks a month or something, it would be worth it for the peace of mind of knowing that no matter where I was on the Earth I could get through to someone and give them my coordinates to send help. Basically one step above a locator beacon.
As it is though, costs mean I'll probably be sticking with having a locator beacon for a worst case situation and hoping the combination of amateur radio and cell phone can give me voice communications wherever I end up.
You are correct on paper. DSL's dedicated line per subscriber means that if the backbone from the DSLAM is sufficient bottlenecking can be completely avoided, where every user of a DOCSIS 2.0 system is sharing 42mbit/sec divided by the number of users of that node who ended up on the same channel, with total capacity limited by number of channels. DOCSIS 3.0 resolves the first bottleneck by allowing channel bonding, but the second can only be helped by splitting a node.
That said, in the real world my experience has been the exact opposite of what a purely theoretical look would tell you. First and foremost, DSL speeds are terrible. I do business VoIP and have customers all over the US. So far the fastest DSL connection I've seen was an AT&T U-Verse line specced at 18/1.5. In reality it ran closer to 14/1. Most are in the 3-6mbit/sec down range and have either 512k or 768k up, and this is often with the top package offered. Where there's a choice, in all but one case the local cable company offered a 10+mbit down, 1+mbit up package for less money, and it ran more reliably.
I suspect the discrepancies between theory and reality come mainly from the wiring. A typical phone wire is Category 3 at best, capable of handling 16MHz signal bandwidth by the spec, though the latest high-end short range DSL specs like VDSL2+ operate with a 30MHz signal. Range is obviously affected dramatically by exceeding the rated capacity. Now looking at cable, a TV channel is 6MHz wide. This means that five TV channels on any old cable system have the same signal bandwidth as the absolute latest "hope you're not more than 1km from the DSLAM" DSL technology. A typical cable system has capacity for between 80 and 160 channels. Obviously some are taken for analog TV (1:1 ratio of viewable channels to RF channels) and digital TV (between 4:1 and 10:1 I've heard depending on bandwidth allocated in the encoders), but what's left is often more than enough to support the bursty oversubscription-friendly uses of the average home or small business customer while at the same time being able to offer significantly higher burst speeds.
There's also the factor that a cable company's entire purpose in existence is to get a lot of those 6MHz channels to you and has been for the entire time the cable industry as we know it has been around. They're good at it and their infrastructure is built for it. On the other side, telcos have been moving 8kHz voice channels for decades and only in the past decade or so have they had to think about higher bandwidth for anything but their backbones and leased lines.
Another nice thing is the architecture means an outage usually involves more than just you. Unless it's specifically your lines or modem that have gone bad, the cable company probably has a few dozen customers at minimum yelling at them to fix their shit which tends to mean it gets done faster.
Lastly, and this is entirely the fault of the DSL providers rather than a problem with the technology itself, is PPPoE. Those who want or need to use their own router rather than the crap built in to the modem often have to jump through hoops to get the modem to just bridge, then they have to deal with a total lack of diagnostics when it goes wrong. On cable, I plug in my ethernet cord and either set an IP or use DHCP, end of story. There's no good technical reason to use that crap and I know some providers do just run a straight bridged DHCP setup, but for some reason the vast majority of the DSL connections in the US are stuck with it.
Again, on paper DSL is superior at least until you hit the bandwidth limits (24/3.5 for ADSL2+, 250/100 for VDSL2 at extremely short range), but those speeds fall off rapidly with distance and wiring that's anything but perfect, meaning that as long as the node isn't terribly overloaded or outdated I always expect cable to perform better.
Well yea, I was just pointing out that particular key as having likely been shared more than any other key in history, being the original leaked key with the RTM of Windows XP Corporate. That key was pretty much the reason for WGA to be invented.
How is unlocking a phone ever theft? So what if you unlock it to work on another carrier while still in contract with your first? You still have to pay your contracted plan regardless of if you're using it or not, so whether the phone is unlocked is entirely irrelevant.
I've unlocked every GSM phone I've ever owned that wasn't factory unlocked, yet I've never skipped out on a contract. Funny that, sometimes it's nice to be able to swap in a prepaid SIM on another carrier for testing or travel.
Anyone trying to make any form of unlocking illegal ever should jump off a bridge, and those who build their business models on locked phones without contracts are setting themselves up to get fucked when an unlock method is eventually discovered.
To me, this seems like an easy problem to solve. Provide some method to set up overrides for processes which may not be properly recognized. Distros can edit the override list as part of package installation so their users don't have to deal with it if they don't want to and the power users and/or odd use cases can easily make it fit their needs.
I'd be surprised if something like this doesn't exist, though there may not yet be a decent interface for the specific use I suggest.
It doesn't bias the results. If you look at any of the searches mentioned in the article yes the Google thing appears at the top, but it is fairly obvious it's not a web search result.
If Google sees a normal search go through that their engine thinks may be better served by running in one of their other tools, it does that and offers a small preview at the top of the page, then starts the results below. It does not change the results themselves though, and I can not see anyone confusing those previews for search results. Also, as noted where they link to their own services they also link to the same information at other sites.
No bias in the search itself, no real story, just someone who wanted to whine.
Other problem with WPA2: There are still somehow a number of devices out there that do not support it. I'm not sure how, since from what I've seen on the Linux side of things a driver or even OS-level update should allow any WiFi card to handle any form of encryption as long as it can see the network, but either I'm wrong about that or the driver/OS developers on the Windows side just don't give a shit.
Also the Nintendo DS and other embedded devices likely will never be updated even if they could be. That's not much of a problem for the hotspot providers, but it is why home routers even still support WEP (though I sometimes wonder why anything still offers the option of 128 bit WEP. They're both trivial to crack, so why bother putting the effort in to anything more than 64 bit?)
FUCK. It's not like entering someone's home, it's like turning to the same channel they're talking on on a CB. THEY ARE BROADCASTING IN THE CLEAR. THEY HAVE NO FUCKING PRIVACY!
Or that there's no reason for a probe to ever have been started. They gathered data from open radio transmitters. There is absolutely ZERO privacy expectation for anything transmitted on open protocols in the clear, so I say tough shit to anyone whose "private" data was captured.
If I strap a tape deck to my radio scanner and drive around recording whatever comes across am I violating the privacy of people who I pick up? Hell no. So why is it such a big deal for Google to do exactly the same with digital data rather than analog voice?
It's already been stated that the reason the data was captured is that Google chose to do things "The Unix Way" and basically strap together a few common apps in their cars, including a packet capture tool. This makes sense since Wireshark (and assumedly all other software that relies on libpcap) can record signal strength with every packet received. Run that constantly and have something logging your GPS position regularly enough, then you can just feed the data in to a processing tool after the fact to go through and create a rough map of what WiFi BSSIDs are where (which is exactly what the data was gathered for, iPhones and Android phones among others can use the WiFi devices they see to get their location).
There's no logical reason they should even have to change what they're doing, but since the majority of the world seems to not understand that they may as well be yelling their personal data in to a CB mic if they send it over unencrypted WiFi, they're changing their toolset anyways to please the public. As such, since there wasn't a problem in the first place and the activity people bitch about is stopping, there's no reason the FTC needs to do a damn thing. There are plenty of other real problems out there for them to deal with.
I've been intermittently experimenting with VoIP over mobile networks for the past few years, and it seems very carrier dependent. Myself and a coworker have both used softphone clients on jailbroken iPhones over the AT&T network, both EDGE and 3G, with decent success. EDGE was a bit flaky with G.711 and G.722, but G.729 was solid and 3G worked fine with all. Latency was a bit unpredictable on both, though much more stable on 3G (150-400ms vs. 200-900ms). On 3G it's never made a call intolerable.
For the past few weeks I've been using Sipdroid on an HTC Evo on the Sprint network. I've had it on Sprint native 3G as well as roaming on Verizon 1xRTT and in both cases had usable G.722 and G.711 calls. I've never had to fail down to a sub-64k codec and I've even used it while in a moving vehicle (which tends to hurt mobile data performance).
See that kills the best part of having a modern smartphone, in my opinion. I love knowing that if I'm within CDMA coverage in the US (which is most anywhere with any cell coverage, thanks Sprint for getting a good roaming deal with Verizon) I can pull my phone out and either send or receive not just audio but photos, video, or any other form of data. Yesterday I made a wideband "HD Voice" VoIP call not because I had any reason to (I have 450 minutes a month, I barely use 30) but because I wanted to see if it would work.
I would have no problem with caps if they were consistent with the normal uses that make smartphones interesting. The previous standard of 5GB caps should be the minimum, yet recently one company (AT&T) actually shrank their maximum down to 2GB. The web is getting more and more bandwidth intense and that's what we're getting sold smartphones as for. Web and multimedia apps, both need bandwidth limits to increase.
That was my immediate thought as well. Not only were those systems easy to emulate, they also had the problem that damage would make the disk (or disc) unusable by the application long before it was actually unreadable by screwing up the pattern. As with most content protection, it didn't work and screwed legitimate consumers while not harming pirates at all, yet for some reason the idea keeps coming back with every new data medium.
If they were alive today, they'd be connecting water mains to your Internet tubes, so you would get a splash in your face, when you pull the cable on your DSL.
This post really isn't getting the attention it deserves. The Three Stooges were great and "A Plumbing We Will Go" is possibly one of my favorites.
Care to quote any sources on that claim? The posts by the podcasters involved state that they're not allowed by the CBC to use ANY Creative Commons licensed content, not just those under non-commercial license. This is also specifically noted as a result of negotiations with "artists rights" groups, not as just coming from CBC management.
I'm not sure how CC has the wording on derivative works and thus how that would affect playing music in a podcast (is the entire podcast now considered a derivative work, or is it fine to play the unmodified original in the middle of your show?), but the basic CC license itself would be completely fine with use in an ad-supported show.
To summarize, CC is completely compatible with these shows, CC-NC is not, and ND and SA may or may not be usable depending on wording. There's no good reason for a blanket ban on all CC content. From the evidence available to me at the moment it seems the Slashdot version is accurate and you're the one full of shit.
This has happened to me once. I got a virus and a couple hours later, my internet was off. I called the service desk and I was told that my computer was infected and get this, I need to download a patch to fix it. "How do I download a patch when my internet is off, I asked." "Bring your computer to the service center when we open on Monday." I instantly canceled my service. I was a college student at that time. Some tasks required the internet. In fact the only way to turn in my physics homework was to upload it to the server by 2am on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I don't need to be worrying about my internet shutting off at random times and having to make a midnight dash to campus to use the library computer.
If you're cutting it that close, you're asking for trouble anyways. What if your internet just goes down for other reasons? Cable cut, upstream outage, etc. Of all the reasons your internet could go down, the one to be concerned about is not the one you have complete control over.
I try to keep my computer clean. I run firewalls and I have virus scanners, but if you haven't been infected with a virus before then you haven't been on the internet long enough.
The last time I had any machine infected was in the days of dial-up when I was using a Windows 98 box with no protection as a gateway between my wireless LAN and the modem. In the modern internet world where most people are connecting through a NAT router it's all but impossible to get infected without a failure on your end such as neglecting to keep your OS/browser/plugins up to date.
Sooner or later you'll get infected and god forbid if you rely on the internet. IE VoIP or server hosting. Why do I get punished for what other people do?
I see this discussion as primarily focusing on residential/SOHO connections, if you're hosting servers that matter to other people on that sort of connection there are larger problems. If the servers are personal only, well there's more reason for you to not get your shit infected.
Should car manufacturers be able to remotely turn off your car when your car starts to leak oil or freon?
No, but if you're causing a hazard to other people on the road the police will sure as shit stop you.
Listen, if an ISP has detected bad stuff coming from your connection it probably means it was coming in significant volume. That means every second longer you're on the internet is a second you're potentially causing problems for whoever the bad traffic is aimed at. If it was only affecting you I'd agree with your point, but you are not operating in a bubble.
I will agree that your ISP does not handle this properly. The correct response is to place the user in a walled garden where they get redirected to an ISP support page explaining the situation and are only allowed access to AV and OS vendor update servers. I'd implement it with a three strikes policy resetting every month or so. Strike one, you can simply push a button in the walled garden to say "i fixed it, let me out". Strike two, you need to speak with ISP support before they let you out. Strike three, you need to provide proof of a third-party tech cleaning your system since you obviously are not competent enough to clean it yourself and keep it clean.
This way if something minor happens, a friend brings over an infected laptop, etc. you can easily just remove that user from the network and jump back on but the system still prevents stubborn asshole users from simply clicking "let me back on" without fixing anything.
Yes it means if you fail at keeping your systems clean you still may find yourself unable to get online when you need to turn in a paper, but at that point it's as if you neglected all maintenance on your car and then complained when it wouldn't start to get you to class.
Well okay but the reference to the southern sky probably means it uses equatorial satellites, which should at least work to the same south latitude as the northern limit.
Not likely. The satellite this uses has one big dish which is pointed in the general direction of the US. Southern hemisphere users could get a signal to the satellite just the same, but it's not listening in their direction.
eSATA does not always require separate power. Most eSATA-equipped laptops on the market right now use a port known as eSATAp which adds in both power and USB 2.0 compatibility. It's less common on desktops, but is gaining in popularity. Since an eSATA + USB enclosure is generally within a few dollars of a straight eSATA or USB model it's the best of both worlds. With the right hardware at both ends you get full SATA speeds on a one-cable power+data solution, but either end can fail back to USB 2 as necessary for compatibility with the world.
they are not working on Steam for Linux right now.
This confirms they will be working on it later!
Though this is obviously in jest, it's not like it's unheard of for Valve to completely change their position on a platform.
Gabe Newell on the PS3, January 2007:
The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think it's really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted. I'd say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a 'do over.' Just say, 'This was a horrible disaster and we're sorry and we're going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it.'
Gabe Newell on the PS3, October 2007:
I think [PS3 is] a waste of everybody's time. Investing in the Cell, investing in the SPE gives you no long-term benefits. There's nothing there that you're going to apply to anything else. You're not going to gain anything except a hatred of the architecture they've created. I don't think they're going to make money off their box. I don't think it's a good solution.
Gabe Newll on the PS3, May 2010:
We would love to see the PS3 be more open like a Mac than more closed like a Gamecube. It makes it easier to justify those investments if that were the case.
One month later he was on stage at E3 during Sony's keynote announcing Portal 2.
I completely agree that Steam on Linux as a released product is unlikely any time soon. We've seen the fragments that made it in to the Mac code so we know it's being worked on, but there's a huge gap between some (or even just one) of the developers tinkering in their spare time and having a workable program plus games to deploy with it. The actual technology's not going to be much different than the Mac code, but the support for the various distros and often crappy video drivers and everything that comes with those is still the biggest hurdle to clear.
I agree there should be a function to move saves between accounts, though I can see why the achievement system could be thrown entirely out of whack by that as well, so there could be reasons it's not there.
Copying a save is never going to happen for any game with an online component as it would make it too easy for everyone to just copy the same save and have all the stuff you're expected to unlock.
On the whole though, the system makes it very very easy to make a new account from the same screen where it asks you to log in before playing and it's trivial to move your account around between boxes if you play enough to care. Take this one game you and your friend worked on as a lesson in how gamer profiles work, take 30 seconds to create yourself one, and never have to worry about it again.
Key word there is PURCHASE. You said it initially, then you respond by bringing up content earned through gameplay. Obviously that's on a per-save basis, but again I was only talking about purchased items just as you said.
I don't want to run into problems where "Oh crap, I must have started that game while on my sister's account or xbox, looks like all that playtime gets reset if I want to play it on MY account/xbox"
1. There are no problems moving games between Xboxes.
2. Saves are locked to their associated gamertag. This is designed to solve the "Oh crap, my brother/sister/parent/dog played on my console and erased my f*cking save!" problem. Just create yourself an XBL Silver gamertag, it takes seconds and is completely free, then all your stuff will be safely partitioned away. The 360 can use a USB drive to save, so even if you don't own a 360 at all you can just put your account and gamertag on any cheap USB drive to easily take it between friends houses.
Or maybe that's not the problem, I don't know, because everything gets so freaking out of whack if you don't play the games exactly as you were 'supposed' to play them as defined by the service.
What the fuck are you talking about? Log in to your account, play game any way you feel like.
I also love how it used to be that if I bought something and hooked it up to my television that it was a household purchase. Now? Looks like I'd have to buy every item for each person in my family if they want to enjoy the same game that I have.
And that hasn't changed at all. Purchases are tied both to the account and Xbox that they were bought with, so anyone playing on that Xbox can access the content regardless and that user can access it on any Xbox. It's very well implemented and there's an easy transfer tool to reassign the content to a different console in the event of a dead console or buying a new model.
So no, you're totally wrong if you think you need to buy content once for each person. One console, one purchase, everyone can use it.
although in the long run they could result in less or even no DRM being applied.
I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that historically people understand that once you've lost something it's hard to get it back, so unless these new stricter copyright laws come with a legal requirement that DRM be reduced at the same time most people would expect that the DRM really won't change at all and the laws will get stricter, making a worse situation overall.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see the small utility app market having a market correction, since a lot of those are fairly overpriced on the Mac platform compared to their counterparts on other platforms, but aside from those and possibly games of the same class as a smartphone game I wouldn't expect much change. Steam's been out for years and has millions of satisfied users, yet all the titles on it have regular prices within $10 of, if not matching, retail. They tend to go on sale more often and with deeper discounts, but that's in my opinion more related to the significantly reduced overhead of online versus retail allowing for much greater dips while maintaining the same profit margin.
Basically anything that is significantly impacted price-wise by the App Store was likely overpriced to begin with.
Nobody wants to expose all their internal addresses. Period. Which part of that can you dumb fucks not understand? No organisation is going to want to implement that.
1. Deny all default inbound rule on the firewall. Done. Same level of security as NAT.
2. There are still link-local addresses if you want to configure machines or services to be local-only.
NAT is a bad thing. It's a hack to resolve a problem (limited IPs) that IPv6 eliminates, so get rid of it.
I feel exactly the same. I'm a bit of a communications geek so if there were any way for me to have a satellite phone which wouldn't be a total waste of money I'd have one by now. Unfortunately as you mention every prepaid plan expires the minutes very soon and the most basic service otherwise costs more than my nicely-featured smartphone without even including any actual usage.
If the satphone providers would offer an "emergency phone" package where I could pick up a used phone and have a small set of minutes (10-15 would seem to be sufficient for the purpose) that don't ever expire (or at least have an expiration time measured in multiple years) I'd certainly pick one up and keep it in my travel emergency kit. I could even understand a few bucks a month or something, it would be worth it for the peace of mind of knowing that no matter where I was on the Earth I could get through to someone and give them my coordinates to send help. Basically one step above a locator beacon.
As it is though, costs mean I'll probably be sticking with having a locator beacon for a worst case situation and hoping the combination of amateur radio and cell phone can give me voice communications wherever I end up.
You are correct on paper. DSL's dedicated line per subscriber means that if the backbone from the DSLAM is sufficient bottlenecking can be completely avoided, where every user of a DOCSIS 2.0 system is sharing 42mbit/sec divided by the number of users of that node who ended up on the same channel, with total capacity limited by number of channels. DOCSIS 3.0 resolves the first bottleneck by allowing channel bonding, but the second can only be helped by splitting a node.
That said, in the real world my experience has been the exact opposite of what a purely theoretical look would tell you. First and foremost, DSL speeds are terrible. I do business VoIP and have customers all over the US. So far the fastest DSL connection I've seen was an AT&T U-Verse line specced at 18/1.5. In reality it ran closer to 14/1. Most are in the 3-6mbit/sec down range and have either 512k or 768k up, and this is often with the top package offered. Where there's a choice, in all but one case the local cable company offered a 10+mbit down, 1+mbit up package for less money, and it ran more reliably.
I suspect the discrepancies between theory and reality come mainly from the wiring. A typical phone wire is Category 3 at best, capable of handling 16MHz signal bandwidth by the spec, though the latest high-end short range DSL specs like VDSL2+ operate with a 30MHz signal. Range is obviously affected dramatically by exceeding the rated capacity. Now looking at cable, a TV channel is 6MHz wide. This means that five TV channels on any old cable system have the same signal bandwidth as the absolute latest "hope you're not more than 1km from the DSLAM" DSL technology. A typical cable system has capacity for between 80 and 160 channels. Obviously some are taken for analog TV (1:1 ratio of viewable channels to RF channels) and digital TV (between 4:1 and 10:1 I've heard depending on bandwidth allocated in the encoders), but what's left is often more than enough to support the bursty oversubscription-friendly uses of the average home or small business customer while at the same time being able to offer significantly higher burst speeds.
There's also the factor that a cable company's entire purpose in existence is to get a lot of those 6MHz channels to you and has been for the entire time the cable industry as we know it has been around. They're good at it and their infrastructure is built for it. On the other side, telcos have been moving 8kHz voice channels for decades and only in the past decade or so have they had to think about higher bandwidth for anything but their backbones and leased lines.
Another nice thing is the architecture means an outage usually involves more than just you. Unless it's specifically your lines or modem that have gone bad, the cable company probably has a few dozen customers at minimum yelling at them to fix their shit which tends to mean it gets done faster.
Lastly, and this is entirely the fault of the DSL providers rather than a problem with the technology itself, is PPPoE. Those who want or need to use their own router rather than the crap built in to the modem often have to jump through hoops to get the modem to just bridge, then they have to deal with a total lack of diagnostics when it goes wrong. On cable, I plug in my ethernet cord and either set an IP or use DHCP, end of story. There's no good technical reason to use that crap and I know some providers do just run a straight bridged DHCP setup, but for some reason the vast majority of the DSL connections in the US are stuck with it.
Again, on paper DSL is superior at least until you hit the bandwidth limits (24/3.5 for ADSL2+, 250/100 for VDSL2 at extremely short range), but those speeds fall off rapidly with distance and wiring that's anything but perfect, meaning that as long as the node isn't terribly overloaded or outdated I always expect cable to perform better.
Well yea, I was just pointing out that particular key as having likely been shared more than any other key in history, being the original leaked key with the RTM of Windows XP Corporate. That key was pretty much the reason for WGA to be invented.
FCKGW-RHQQ2...
How is unlocking a phone ever theft? So what if you unlock it to work on another carrier while still in contract with your first? You still have to pay your contracted plan regardless of if you're using it or not, so whether the phone is unlocked is entirely irrelevant.
I've unlocked every GSM phone I've ever owned that wasn't factory unlocked, yet I've never skipped out on a contract. Funny that, sometimes it's nice to be able to swap in a prepaid SIM on another carrier for testing or travel.
Anyone trying to make any form of unlocking illegal ever should jump off a bridge, and those who build their business models on locked phones without contracts are setting themselves up to get fucked when an unlock method is eventually discovered.
To me, this seems like an easy problem to solve. Provide some method to set up overrides for processes which may not be properly recognized. Distros can edit the override list as part of package installation so their users don't have to deal with it if they don't want to and the power users and/or odd use cases can easily make it fit their needs.
I'd be surprised if something like this doesn't exist, though there may not yet be a decent interface for the specific use I suggest.
It doesn't bias the results. If you look at any of the searches mentioned in the article yes the Google thing appears at the top, but it is fairly obvious it's not a web search result.
If Google sees a normal search go through that their engine thinks may be better served by running in one of their other tools, it does that and offers a small preview at the top of the page, then starts the results below. It does not change the results themselves though, and I can not see anyone confusing those previews for search results. Also, as noted where they link to their own services they also link to the same information at other sites.
No bias in the search itself, no real story, just someone who wanted to whine.
Other problem with WPA2: There are still somehow a number of devices out there that do not support it. I'm not sure how, since from what I've seen on the Linux side of things a driver or even OS-level update should allow any WiFi card to handle any form of encryption as long as it can see the network, but either I'm wrong about that or the driver/OS developers on the Windows side just don't give a shit.
Also the Nintendo DS and other embedded devices likely will never be updated even if they could be. That's not much of a problem for the hotspot providers, but it is why home routers even still support WEP (though I sometimes wonder why anything still offers the option of 128 bit WEP. They're both trivial to crack, so why bother putting the effort in to anything more than 64 bit?)
FUCK. It's not like entering someone's home, it's like turning to the same channel they're talking on on a CB. THEY ARE BROADCASTING IN THE CLEAR. THEY HAVE NO FUCKING PRIVACY!
Or that there's no reason for a probe to ever have been started. They gathered data from open radio transmitters. There is absolutely ZERO privacy expectation for anything transmitted on open protocols in the clear, so I say tough shit to anyone whose "private" data was captured.
If I strap a tape deck to my radio scanner and drive around recording whatever comes across am I violating the privacy of people who I pick up? Hell no. So why is it such a big deal for Google to do exactly the same with digital data rather than analog voice?
It's already been stated that the reason the data was captured is that Google chose to do things "The Unix Way" and basically strap together a few common apps in their cars, including a packet capture tool. This makes sense since Wireshark (and assumedly all other software that relies on libpcap) can record signal strength with every packet received. Run that constantly and have something logging your GPS position regularly enough, then you can just feed the data in to a processing tool after the fact to go through and create a rough map of what WiFi BSSIDs are where (which is exactly what the data was gathered for, iPhones and Android phones among others can use the WiFi devices they see to get their location).
There's no logical reason they should even have to change what they're doing, but since the majority of the world seems to not understand that they may as well be yelling their personal data in to a CB mic if they send it over unencrypted WiFi, they're changing their toolset anyways to please the public. As such, since there wasn't a problem in the first place and the activity people bitch about is stopping, there's no reason the FTC needs to do a damn thing. There are plenty of other real problems out there for them to deal with.
I've been intermittently experimenting with VoIP over mobile networks for the past few years, and it seems very carrier dependent. Myself and a coworker have both used softphone clients on jailbroken iPhones over the AT&T network, both EDGE and 3G, with decent success. EDGE was a bit flaky with G.711 and G.722, but G.729 was solid and 3G worked fine with all. Latency was a bit unpredictable on both, though much more stable on 3G (150-400ms vs. 200-900ms). On 3G it's never made a call intolerable.
For the past few weeks I've been using Sipdroid on an HTC Evo on the Sprint network. I've had it on Sprint native 3G as well as roaming on Verizon 1xRTT and in both cases had usable G.722 and G.711 calls. I've never had to fail down to a sub-64k codec and I've even used it while in a moving vehicle (which tends to hurt mobile data performance).
See that kills the best part of having a modern smartphone, in my opinion. I love knowing that if I'm within CDMA coverage in the US (which is most anywhere with any cell coverage, thanks Sprint for getting a good roaming deal with Verizon) I can pull my phone out and either send or receive not just audio but photos, video, or any other form of data. Yesterday I made a wideband "HD Voice" VoIP call not because I had any reason to (I have 450 minutes a month, I barely use 30) but because I wanted to see if it would work.
I would have no problem with caps if they were consistent with the normal uses that make smartphones interesting. The previous standard of 5GB caps should be the minimum, yet recently one company (AT&T) actually shrank their maximum down to 2GB. The web is getting more and more bandwidth intense and that's what we're getting sold smartphones as for. Web and multimedia apps, both need bandwidth limits to increase.
That was my immediate thought as well. Not only were those systems easy to emulate, they also had the problem that damage would make the disk (or disc) unusable by the application long before it was actually unreadable by screwing up the pattern. As with most content protection, it didn't work and screwed legitimate consumers while not harming pirates at all, yet for some reason the idea keeps coming back with every new data medium.
If they were alive today, they'd be connecting water mains to your Internet tubes, so you would get a splash in your face, when you pull the cable on your DSL.
This post really isn't getting the attention it deserves. The Three Stooges were great and "A Plumbing We Will Go" is possibly one of my favorites.
Care to quote any sources on that claim? The posts by the podcasters involved state that they're not allowed by the CBC to use ANY Creative Commons licensed content, not just those under non-commercial license. This is also specifically noted as a result of negotiations with "artists rights" groups, not as just coming from CBC management.
I'm not sure how CC has the wording on derivative works and thus how that would affect playing music in a podcast (is the entire podcast now considered a derivative work, or is it fine to play the unmodified original in the middle of your show?), but the basic CC license itself would be completely fine with use in an ad-supported show.
To summarize, CC is completely compatible with these shows, CC-NC is not, and ND and SA may or may not be usable depending on wording. There's no good reason for a blanket ban on all CC content. From the evidence available to me at the moment it seems the Slashdot version is accurate and you're the one full of shit.
This has happened to me once. I got a virus and a couple hours later, my internet was off. I called the service desk and I was told that my computer was infected and get this, I need to download a patch to fix it. "How do I download a patch when my internet is off, I asked." "Bring your computer to the service center when we open on Monday." I instantly canceled my service. I was a college student at that time. Some tasks required the internet. In fact the only way to turn in my physics homework was to upload it to the server by 2am on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I don't need to be worrying about my internet shutting off at random times and having to make a midnight dash to campus to use the library computer.
If you're cutting it that close, you're asking for trouble anyways. What if your internet just goes down for other reasons? Cable cut, upstream outage, etc. Of all the reasons your internet could go down, the one to be concerned about is not the one you have complete control over.
I try to keep my computer clean. I run firewalls and I have virus scanners, but if you haven't been infected with a virus before then you haven't been on the internet long enough.
The last time I had any machine infected was in the days of dial-up when I was using a Windows 98 box with no protection as a gateway between my wireless LAN and the modem. In the modern internet world where most people are connecting through a NAT router it's all but impossible to get infected without a failure on your end such as neglecting to keep your OS/browser/plugins up to date.
Sooner or later you'll get infected and god forbid if you rely on the internet. IE VoIP or server hosting. Why do I get punished for what other people do?
I see this discussion as primarily focusing on residential/SOHO connections, if you're hosting servers that matter to other people on that sort of connection there are larger problems. If the servers are personal only, well there's more reason for you to not get your shit infected.
Should car manufacturers be able to remotely turn off your car when your car starts to leak oil or freon?
No, but if you're causing a hazard to other people on the road the police will sure as shit stop you.
Listen, if an ISP has detected bad stuff coming from your connection it probably means it was coming in significant volume. That means every second longer you're on the internet is a second you're potentially causing problems for whoever the bad traffic is aimed at. If it was only affecting you I'd agree with your point, but you are not operating in a bubble.
I will agree that your ISP does not handle this properly. The correct response is to place the user in a walled garden where they get redirected to an ISP support page explaining the situation and are only allowed access to AV and OS vendor update servers. I'd implement it with a three strikes policy resetting every month or so. Strike one, you can simply push a button in the walled garden to say "i fixed it, let me out". Strike two, you need to speak with ISP support before they let you out. Strike three, you need to provide proof of a third-party tech cleaning your system since you obviously are not competent enough to clean it yourself and keep it clean.
This way if something minor happens, a friend brings over an infected laptop, etc. you can easily just remove that user from the network and jump back on but the system still prevents stubborn asshole users from simply clicking "let me back on" without fixing anything.
Yes it means if you fail at keeping your systems clean you still may find yourself unable to get online when you need to turn in a paper, but at that point it's as if you neglected all maintenance on your car and then complained when it wouldn't start to get you to class.
Well okay but the reference to the southern sky probably means it uses equatorial satellites, which should at least work to the same south latitude as the northern limit.
Not likely. The satellite this uses has one big dish which is pointed in the general direction of the US. Southern hemisphere users could get a signal to the satellite just the same, but it's not listening in their direction.
eSATA does not always require separate power. Most eSATA-equipped laptops on the market right now use a port known as eSATAp which adds in both power and USB 2.0 compatibility. It's less common on desktops, but is gaining in popularity. Since an eSATA + USB enclosure is generally within a few dollars of a straight eSATA or USB model it's the best of both worlds. With the right hardware at both ends you get full SATA speeds on a one-cable power+data solution, but either end can fail back to USB 2 as necessary for compatibility with the world.
they are not working on Steam for Linux right now.
This confirms they will be working on it later!
Though this is obviously in jest, it's not like it's unheard of for Valve to completely change their position on a platform.
Gabe Newell on the PS3, January 2007:
The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think it's really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted. I'd say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a 'do over.' Just say, 'This was a horrible disaster and we're sorry and we're going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it.'
Gabe Newell on the PS3, October 2007:
I think [PS3 is] a waste of everybody's time. Investing in the Cell, investing in the SPE gives you no long-term benefits. There's nothing there that you're going to apply to anything else. You're not going to gain anything except a hatred of the architecture they've created. I don't think they're going to make money off their box. I don't think it's a good solution.
Gabe Newll on the PS3, May 2010:
We would love to see the PS3 be more open like a Mac than more closed like a Gamecube. It makes it easier to justify those investments if that were the case.
One month later he was on stage at E3 during Sony's keynote announcing Portal 2.
I completely agree that Steam on Linux as a released product is unlikely any time soon. We've seen the fragments that made it in to the Mac code so we know it's being worked on, but there's a huge gap between some (or even just one) of the developers tinkering in their spare time and having a workable program plus games to deploy with it. The actual technology's not going to be much different than the Mac code, but the support for the various distros and often crappy video drivers and everything that comes with those is still the biggest hurdle to clear.
I agree there should be a function to move saves between accounts, though I can see why the achievement system could be thrown entirely out of whack by that as well, so there could be reasons it's not there.
Copying a save is never going to happen for any game with an online component as it would make it too easy for everyone to just copy the same save and have all the stuff you're expected to unlock.
On the whole though, the system makes it very very easy to make a new account from the same screen where it asks you to log in before playing and it's trivial to move your account around between boxes if you play enough to care. Take this one game you and your friend worked on as a lesson in how gamer profiles work, take 30 seconds to create yourself one, and never have to worry about it again.
Key word there is PURCHASE. You said it initially, then you respond by bringing up content earned through gameplay. Obviously that's on a per-save basis, but again I was only talking about purchased items just as you said.
I don't want to run into problems where "Oh crap, I must have started that game while on my sister's account or xbox, looks like all that playtime gets reset if I want to play it on MY account/xbox"
1. There are no problems moving games between Xboxes.
2. Saves are locked to their associated gamertag. This is designed to solve the "Oh crap, my brother/sister/parent/dog played on my console and erased my f*cking save!" problem. Just create yourself an XBL Silver gamertag, it takes seconds and is completely free, then all your stuff will be safely partitioned away. The 360 can use a USB drive to save, so even if you don't own a 360 at all you can just put your account and gamertag on any cheap USB drive to easily take it between friends houses.
Or maybe that's not the problem, I don't know, because everything gets so freaking out of whack if you don't play the games exactly as you were 'supposed' to play them as defined by the service.
What the fuck are you talking about? Log in to your account, play game any way you feel like.
I also love how it used to be that if I bought something and hooked it up to my television that it was a household purchase. Now? Looks like I'd have to buy every item for each person in my family if they want to enjoy the same game that I have.
And that hasn't changed at all. Purchases are tied both to the account and Xbox that they were bought with, so anyone playing on that Xbox can access the content regardless and that user can access it on any Xbox. It's very well implemented and there's an easy transfer tool to reassign the content to a different console in the event of a dead console or buying a new model.
So no, you're totally wrong if you think you need to buy content once for each person. One console, one purchase, everyone can use it.
although in the long run they could result in less or even no DRM being applied.
I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that historically people understand that once you've lost something it's hard to get it back, so unless these new stricter copyright laws come with a legal requirement that DRM be reduced at the same time most people would expect that the DRM really won't change at all and the laws will get stricter, making a worse situation overall.