Actually, if you do more than gaming, there are MANY situations where capacity is far more important than blistering performance.
For example, on one of my home NAS boxes, as long as performance is adequate to stream 1080p video to my STBs, faster drives offer little to no additional value. Therefore the price/performance of spinning disk is FAR more attractive than SSD. I won't even go into all of the situations in my professional life where wasting money on extreme performance would be flat out irresponsible.
SSDs definitely have their place, but spinning disk is going to remain important for quite some time yet.
Well, no, smoking locally grown weed in the same municipality or state or flying a drone that never actually interferes with interstate travel of goods and people happens entirely within a state's borders and the US Constitution affords almost no jurisdiction in such cases.
By smoking locally grown weed in Colorado, you have reduced the demand for weed grown in California, thereby affecting interstate commerce and giving the federal government jurisdiction.
If that sounds ridiculous, that's because it is. However, that argument still gets used (successfully) when the feds really, really want to stick their noses in where they don't belong.
Well, yeah, if you can maintain complete control over the information a person has access to, then, yes, over a period of time you could mold the way they think.
Nobody has that ability. Not the US govt, not the Iranian govt, and certainly not Facebook. "Reasonable and intelligent people" are able to recognize when they're being fed propaganda, and take it with the appropriate dosage of salt.
It's the idiots and morons that swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Obviously, that makes these people a very valuable target audience if you're running for political office.
The best thing about AOL was that for several years, I never had to buy floppy disks. I could count on a reliable stream of free ones showing up in my mail box on a regular basis. Sometimes 2 or 3 in a day.
I was quite perturbed when they switched to sending their shit out on CD.....
That's why I said earlier in this thread that I have reinforced my belief that my next car will be a late 60's or early 70's muscle car.
Might not be as "green" as some would like. But it was built without any spy tech, and I could spot any suspicious crap that has been added on after the fact.
Not like today's models, which are basically just computers on wheels. Take out the factory radio to install a superior aftermarket model, and suddenly your heater doesn't work.
You can't tell me there's not a 3 letter agency behind that sort of retarded engineering.
Given our success in the "War on Drugs", we should declare war on prosperity.
Given our success in the "War on Terror", we should declare war on freedom.
Seems like the only thing we accomplish when we declare "War on" something is to ensure that it will propagate and grow./me declares "War on Giant Piles of Cash in my Bank Account".
(Oh, wait, I already won that war decisively. It was a scorched earth sort of thing. Recovery won't be possible within 10 lifetimes....)
If it is reflecting RF, it is in effect, transmitting.
Well, no. I see what you're trying to say, but... No.
Pretty much by definition transmitting and reflecting are different and separate things.
I suppose it's possible to reflect a signal that you also transmitted, but it would be pointless, since the reflected signal will always be weaker than the transmitted signal.
And then those were all copycatted by "on the Internet" patents.
Which, in turn, are now being copycatted by "in the cloud" patents.
Everyone on the planet can see the absurdity of it except for a very select few morons. Unfortunately, it's those select few morons that we hire to work in the Patent Office.....
There was a time in my life when I believed certain things but was afraid to mention them, lest I be branded paranoid. Two decades having gone by now, it turns out I was actually unrealistically optimistic.
Well, yeah, now that I think about it, I'd have to agree....
There's absolutely nothing wrong with these systems in your vehicle being able to communicate with each other. I think most of us can agree that there are many benefits to it.
The problems only arise when the systems gain the ability to communicate to systems outside of your car. And especially when they can do it without your consent, or even knowledge. And OnStar was the first and most obvious example of that ability.
The first time I ever really noticed OnStar was back when it first came out. A buddy of mine was driving, and we made a stop and he locked his keys in. This was "back in the day" so I immediately started trying to figure out where I could get my hands on a wire coat hanger. He pulled a card out of his wallet, called an 800 number, and a few seconds later all 4 doors unlocked. My initial reaction was "Damn! That's fuckin' cool!"
About 10 seconds later I thought "Damn! That's fuckin' creepy!"
And now it's not just OnStar that can do that. Now cars have bluetooth and WiFi, so if it's not secure (and they don't build them with security in mind"), any smart guy with a cell phone and access to Google can do similarly creepy things....
SIDE NOTE: There's an alley at work where we all go to smoke (yes, I'm a smoker, get over it). On the other side of the alley is another company's parking lot. There are two nearly identical GM SUV's that park in that lot. One has a broken off OnStar antenna, the other has an intact OnStar antenna. All of us refer to the two vehicles as "the smart one" and "the dumb one".
I'm not saying it's irrelevant to the conversation. Not by any means. It holds a very important place in history. But it was it's own, separate thing. It wasn't the Internet, and it wasn't the commercial online services.
In a way, it was the first "common man's" global network. Sure, the Internet existed, and ARPAnet before that, but for many years they were only available to the privileged few.
Fido Net was a way for a regular guy to use his computer to communicate with people outside of his home town.
Seems like nothing today. Back then it was a HUGE deal.
IIRC, AOL didn't offer actual internet access until pretty late in the game.
VERY late in the game.
And when it finally happened, that's the day that the Internet transformed from something great into the ghetto of spam, scams, and ads that it is today.
As someone who moved away from BBS's to the Internet before there was such a thing as a "web site", I feel qualified to say that, No, AOL was not the first.
Back then there was no Firefox. We used gopher. There was no Google. We used archie. Even Mosaic wasn't around yet. There was no "click here to download". We used ftp from the command line. And there goddamn sure as fuck weren't any Viagra ads.
You could freely post your email address online for the whole world to see, with no worries of getting on a spam list. It was a beautiful time.
Not only was AOL not the first, I feel comfortable and confident in saying that, by far, the darkest day the Internet has ever seen was the day that AOL unleashed its hordes.
Yup. Are the brakes actually controllable via CAN though?
Old school brakes, like you'd find in a mid-70's muscle car? Nope.
Modern anti-lock brakes, that depend on computer control? You bet your ass they can be fucked with through the onboard computer.
I'm an old-school geek. I've been fascinated and excited by technology for over 40 years now. But in the last half decade, I've been noticing that we're growing way, WAY too fast. We're implementing things and putting them out in the real world as soon as we "can do it". We're not waiting until "we can do it safely".
Under the deal, all auto companies would make their diagnostic codes and repair data available in a common format by the 2018 model year
If I offer something for sale for the low, low price of $10,000,000, I have complied with the requirement to make it "available". Ain't my problem if you can't afford it.
Meaningful legislation would specify "make available at no cost", or at least set a cap on what they're allowed to charge.
Like the vast majority of legislation these days, this sounds good on the surface, but has too many holes in it to do anyone any good.
CANN Buss which is very similar to old buss... CANN bus as soon as I got it. It was a nightmare. Parts of the dash didn't even work with the factory radio removed! I had to buy an after market CPU to plug into the buss to replicate some of the radios functions just so I could use a standard dinn mount head unit. All of this and the radio I got, that's not on the Buss, has more features.
What, were you playing Scrabble and got stuck with a bunch of extra 'N's and 'S's? It's CAN bus and DIN.
You must be very insecure and unhappy in your real life.
It's the only reason I can think of that you'd try to put down a very factually correct post based on a few irrelevant typos.....
you type faster than me;-) I just said the same thing. lol Also, CAN Buss is not new. It's been in Semis for a very long time.
Also, the people who write the software for this type of platform are, at least traditionally, much more concerned about available RAM than they are about security. In this arena, the old-school folks have always worked in an environment where isolation from the outside world was pretty much a given.
As such, even the fairly ineffective security measures that are in place on the Internet haven't even been considered for use in these types of systems. Attaching wireless capabilities to them was very foolish.
All thing's considered, this all just goes to reinforce my dream of owning a mint condition 1965 Plymouth Barracuda.
Damn, you just described the O'Reilly Sendmail book perfectly! (LMFAO) It's an excellent reference for someone who knows a good amount about Sendmail already, but even as a fairly advanced admin I find it really convoluted in a lot of ways.
To be fair to O'Reilly, it's convoluted because it's about Sendmail.
No admin in their right mind would choose Sendmail these days. For a small installation with no budget, Postfix can do the job and is much simpler to admin. For a large installation, you either get the higher-ups to fork over the dough for CGP, or start firing off resumes.
In this day and age, being a sendmail admin == being a masochist.
Here is why FOSS docs are so nice to you, but proprietary ones are not: audience analysis.
Exactly. The OP gives himself away when he describes his computer use as a "home hobby".
As a pro, I much prefer the nice, succinct, "straight-to-the-point" man pages that you find with open source stuff than the tediously long novels that come along with commercial software.
I'm sure hobbyists would prefer a "for dummies" version, but I just don't have the time to read 30 pages of rambling bullshit just to figure out what the "-x" command line option does.
Personally, I think OSS documentation is, for the most part, exactly what it should be.
Alternate answer:
Docs for commercial software are written by professional "technical writers". Many of them paid by the hour. ALL of them incapable of understanding the details of what they're writing about. Their job is to describe the software to the least common denominator. Many times, the person writing the documentation IS the least common denominator, and couldn't make good use of it to save their life. What they do understand, is that the more words they put in the doc, the bigger their paycheck. So you end up with 750 pages of bullshit that doesn't actually explain how the program works.
OP should fire up a Linux system and type "man rsync" and "man bash", read them top to bottom, and then ask himself why his own inability to comprehend that excellent documentation leaves him thinking that OSS docs aren't up to par.
Any solution is better than no action, even if it may be the wrong one (almost).
The fact that so many people sincerely believe this is a major underlying cause of most of our problems.
Making things worse is most definitely NOT better than leaving things alone.
I agree that things need to change, but care should be taken to ensure that they actually change for the better. It's foolish to advocate change for change's sake.
The problem isn't anyone wanting to know where people drive. The problem is what happens when you combine this database with a few others, and the analytics that are possible.
Do some research. The level of detail of a persons life that they can identify from these "harmlessly tiny bits of information" is staggering.
And No, your VOIP should not have QOS priority over my downloading a debian DVD.
Of course it should. VOIP is time sensitive, your iso download is not. There is a debate to be had over whether that QOS should come with an extra charge, but it should absolutely be an option. And VOIP is pretty low bandwidth, giving it priority over your download is probably going to make the difference between getting your iso in 10 minutes 53 seconds VS. 10 minutes 57 seconds.... Not really enough for anyone to throw a fit over....
The real problem is last-mile providers being monopoly providers, therefore so stingy in making prudent upgrades to the infrastructure that everything is constantly pushed so close to the limits that stuff like this start to make a noticeable difference. On an intelligently designed and provisioned network, time-sensitive traffic could be given all the QOS priority it needs without you every noticing a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you do more than gaming, there are MANY situations where capacity is far more important than blistering performance.
For example, on one of my home NAS boxes, as long as performance is adequate to stream 1080p video to my STBs, faster drives offer little to no additional value. Therefore the price/performance of spinning disk is FAR more attractive than SSD. I won't even go into all of the situations in my professional life where wasting money on extreme performance would be flat out irresponsible.
SSDs definitely have their place, but spinning disk is going to remain important for quite some time yet.
Seriously? You're taking the position that what this country needs is MORE surveillance of the public?
Please die in a fire.
Well, no, smoking locally grown weed in the same municipality or state or flying a drone that never actually interferes with interstate travel of goods and people happens entirely within a state's borders and the US Constitution affords almost no jurisdiction in such cases.
By smoking locally grown weed in Colorado, you have reduced the demand for weed grown in California, thereby affecting interstate commerce and giving the federal government jurisdiction.
If that sounds ridiculous, that's because it is. However, that argument still gets used (successfully) when the feds really, really want to stick their noses in where they don't belong.
Starvation is too good for Woolsey.
I vote for lingchi.
Well, yeah, if you can maintain complete control over the information a person has access to, then, yes, over a period of time you could mold the way they think.
Nobody has that ability. Not the US govt, not the Iranian govt, and certainly not Facebook. "Reasonable and intelligent people" are able to recognize when they're being fed propaganda, and take it with the appropriate dosage of salt.
It's the idiots and morons that swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Obviously, that makes these people a very valuable target audience if you're running for political office.
The best thing about AOL was that for several years, I never had to buy floppy disks. I could count on a reliable stream of free ones showing up in my mail box on a regular basis. Sometimes 2 or 3 in a day.
I was quite perturbed when they switched to sending their shit out on CD.....
He said "intelligent and reasonable" people. And he was right.
It is, however, trivial to influence stupid and unreasonable people. And there is no shortage of those.
That's why I said earlier in this thread that I have reinforced my belief that my next car will be a late 60's or early 70's muscle car.
Might not be as "green" as some would like. But it was built without any spy tech, and I could spot any suspicious crap that has been added on after the fact.
Not like today's models, which are basically just computers on wheels. Take out the factory radio to install a superior aftermarket model, and suddenly your heater doesn't work.
You can't tell me there's not a 3 letter agency behind that sort of retarded engineering.
Given our success in the "War on ...",
Given our success in the "War on Drugs", we should declare war on prosperity.
Given our success in the "War on Terror", we should declare war on freedom.
Seems like the only thing we accomplish when we declare "War on" something is to ensure that it will propagate and grow. /me declares "War on Giant Piles of Cash in my Bank Account".
(Oh, wait, I already won that war decisively. It was a scorched earth sort of thing. Recovery won't be possible within 10 lifetimes....)
If it is reflecting RF, it is in effect, transmitting.
Well, no. I see what you're trying to say, but... No.
Pretty much by definition transmitting and reflecting are different and separate things.
I suppose it's possible to reflect a signal that you also transmitted, but it would be pointless, since the reflected signal will always be weaker than the transmitted signal.
Like all those "... on a computer" patents...
And then those were all copycatted by "on the Internet" patents.
Which, in turn, are now being copycatted by "in the cloud" patents.
Everyone on the planet can see the absurdity of it except for a very select few morons. Unfortunately, it's those select few morons that we hire to work in the Patent Office.....
There was a time in my life when I believed certain things but was afraid to mention them, lest I be branded paranoid. Two decades having gone by now, it turns out I was actually unrealistically optimistic.
Everything was fine until OnStar...
Well, yeah, now that I think about it, I'd have to agree....
There's absolutely nothing wrong with these systems in your vehicle being able to communicate with each other. I think most of us can agree that there are many benefits to it.
The problems only arise when the systems gain the ability to communicate to systems outside of your car. And especially when they can do it without your consent, or even knowledge. And OnStar was the first and most obvious example of that ability.
The first time I ever really noticed OnStar was back when it first came out. A buddy of mine was driving, and we made a stop and he locked his keys in. This was "back in the day" so I immediately started trying to figure out where I could get my hands on a wire coat hanger. He pulled a card out of his wallet, called an 800 number, and a few seconds later all 4 doors unlocked. My initial reaction was "Damn! That's fuckin' cool!"
About 10 seconds later I thought "Damn! That's fuckin' creepy!"
And now it's not just OnStar that can do that. Now cars have bluetooth and WiFi, so if it's not secure (and they don't build them with security in mind"), any smart guy with a cell phone and access to Google can do similarly creepy things....
SIDE NOTE: There's an alley at work where we all go to smoke (yes, I'm a smoker, get over it). On the other side of the alley is another company's parking lot. There are two nearly identical GM SUV's that park in that lot. One has a broken off OnStar antenna, the other has an intact OnStar antenna. All of us refer to the two vehicles as "the smart one" and "the dumb one".
Don't forget about FidoNet :)
FidoNet was something different.
I'm not saying it's irrelevant to the conversation. Not by any means. It holds a very important place in history. But it was it's own, separate thing. It wasn't the Internet, and it wasn't the commercial online services.
In a way, it was the first "common man's" global network. Sure, the Internet existed, and ARPAnet before that, but for many years they were only available to the privileged few.
Fido Net was a way for a regular guy to use his computer to communicate with people outside of his home town.
Seems like nothing today. Back then it was a HUGE deal.
IIRC, AOL didn't offer actual internet access until pretty late in the game.
VERY late in the game.
And when it finally happened, that's the day that the Internet transformed from something great into the ghetto of spam, scams, and ads that it is today.
And, yes... GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!
As someone who moved away from BBS's to the Internet before there was such a thing as a "web site", I feel qualified to say that, No, AOL was not the first.
Back then there was no Firefox. We used gopher.
There was no Google. We used archie.
Even Mosaic wasn't around yet.
There was no "click here to download". We used ftp from the command line. And there goddamn sure as fuck weren't any Viagra ads.
You could freely post your email address online for the whole world to see, with no worries of getting on a spam list. It was a beautiful time.
Not only was AOL not the first, I feel comfortable and confident in saying that, by far, the darkest day the Internet has ever seen was the day that AOL unleashed its hordes.
Yup. Are the brakes actually controllable via CAN though?
Old school brakes, like you'd find in a mid-70's muscle car? Nope.
Modern anti-lock brakes, that depend on computer control? You bet your ass they can be fucked with through the onboard computer.
I'm an old-school geek. I've been fascinated and excited by technology for over 40 years now. But in the last half decade, I've been noticing that we're growing way, WAY too fast. We're implementing things and putting them out in the real world as soon as we "can do it". We're not waiting until "we can do it safely".
It's consumer culture gone wild.
Under the deal, all auto companies would make their diagnostic codes and repair data available in a common format by the 2018 model year
If I offer something for sale for the low, low price of $10,000,000, I have complied with the requirement to make it "available". Ain't my problem if you can't afford it.
Meaningful legislation would specify "make available at no cost", or at least set a cap on what they're allowed to charge.
Like the vast majority of legislation these days, this sounds good on the surface, but has too many holes in it to do anyone any good.
CANN Buss which is very similar to old buss ...
CANN bus as soon as I got it. It was a nightmare. Parts of the dash didn't even work with the factory radio removed! I had to buy an after market CPU to plug into the buss to replicate some of the radios functions just so I could use a standard dinn mount head unit. All of this and the radio I got, that's not on the Buss, has more features.
What, were you playing Scrabble and got stuck with a bunch of extra 'N's and 'S's? It's CAN bus and DIN.
You must be very insecure and unhappy in your real life.
It's the only reason I can think of that you'd try to put down a very factually correct post based on a few irrelevant typos.....
you type faster than me ;-)
I just said the same thing. lol
Also, CAN Buss is not new. It's been in Semis for a very long time.
Also, the people who write the software for this type of platform are, at least traditionally, much more concerned about available RAM than they are about security. In this arena, the old-school folks have always worked in an environment where isolation from the outside world was pretty much a given.
As such, even the fairly ineffective security measures that are in place on the Internet haven't even been considered for use in these types of systems. Attaching wireless capabilities to them was very foolish.
All thing's considered, this all just goes to reinforce my dream of owning a mint condition 1965 Plymouth Barracuda.
Damn, you just described the O'Reilly Sendmail book perfectly! (LMFAO)
It's an excellent reference for someone who knows a good amount about Sendmail already, but even as a fairly advanced admin I find it really convoluted in a lot of ways.
To be fair to O'Reilly, it's convoluted because it's about Sendmail.
No admin in their right mind would choose Sendmail these days. For a small installation with no budget, Postfix can do the job and is much simpler to admin. For a large installation, you either get the higher-ups to fork over the dough for CGP, or start firing off resumes.
In this day and age, being a sendmail admin == being a masochist.
Here is why FOSS docs are so nice to you, but proprietary ones are not: audience analysis.
Exactly. The OP gives himself away when he describes his computer use as a "home hobby".
As a pro, I much prefer the nice, succinct, "straight-to-the-point" man pages that you find with open source stuff than the tediously long novels that come along with commercial software.
I'm sure hobbyists would prefer a "for dummies" version, but I just don't have the time to read 30 pages of rambling bullshit just to figure out what the "-x" command line option does.
Personally, I think OSS documentation is, for the most part, exactly what it should be.
Alternate answer:
Docs for commercial software are written by professional "technical writers". Many of them paid by the hour. ALL of them incapable of understanding the details of what they're writing about. Their job is to describe the software to the least common denominator. Many times, the person writing the documentation IS the least common denominator, and couldn't make good use of it to save their life. What they do understand, is that the more words they put in the doc, the bigger their paycheck. So you end up with 750 pages of bullshit that doesn't actually explain how the program works.
OP should fire up a Linux system and type "man rsync" and "man bash", read them top to bottom, and then ask himself why his own inability to comprehend that excellent documentation leaves him thinking that OSS docs aren't up to par.
Any solution is better than no action, even if it may be the wrong one (almost).
The fact that so many people sincerely believe this is a major underlying cause of most of our problems.
Making things worse is most definitely NOT better than leaving things alone.
I agree that things need to change, but care should be taken to ensure that they actually change for the better. It's foolish to advocate change for change's sake.
As if anyone gives a fuck where you drive.
That's far too simplistic a way to look at it.
The problem isn't anyone wanting to know where people drive. The problem is what happens when you combine this database with a few others, and the analytics that are possible.
Do some research. The level of detail of a persons life that they can identify from these "harmlessly tiny bits of information" is staggering.
And No, your VOIP should not have QOS priority over my downloading a debian DVD.
Of course it should. VOIP is time sensitive, your iso download is not. There is a debate to be had over whether that QOS should come with an extra charge, but it should absolutely be an option. And VOIP is pretty low bandwidth, giving it priority over your download is probably going to make the difference between getting your iso in 10 minutes 53 seconds VS. 10 minutes 57 seconds.... Not really enough for anyone to throw a fit over....
The real problem is last-mile providers being monopoly providers, therefore so stingy in making prudent upgrades to the infrastructure that everything is constantly pushed so close to the limits that stuff like this start to make a noticeable difference. On an intelligently designed and provisioned network, time-sensitive traffic could be given all the QOS priority it needs without you every noticing a difference.
My friends have lots of pictures and videos of their kids.
Ahhh.... So you're one of those.... People who think it's more important to create a record of life than to actually live it.
You're missing out on a lot. I feel bad for you.