Sure, I'd rather store stuff on my own machines than SpiderOak. A cursory read of how some SpiderOak features work doesn't give me confidence that it's an especially secure option once you start sharing files. But it's still much better than leaving everything in plaintext in Dropbox. I just link to them as an alternate to one of the panel's participants, where the alternate is actually viable already.
If Google and Facebook made the same claims as SpiderOak, then I'd be inclined to trust. There are laws about truth in advertising, and they have a history of following through in the limited areas where they do provide security: SSL for everyone, and certificate pinning in Google's web browser. Privacy also totally wrecks their business model, so I don't expect them to do so.
My problem is that I want to control my data by placing it on systems under my control. Storing everything on Google is fine for Eric Schmidt because Eric Schmidt owns (many shares and a significant amount of control) of Google. Storing everything on Google is not so good for me because I don't.
And that's the real issue. Google and Facebook's entire business model is to violate my privacy. I don't know if Dropbox does anything with your data, but they've definitely chosen convenience over security. I'd rather store my stuff on SpiderOak than Dropbox. As long as my data are available to somebody other than me, then my data are vulnerable to hackers and immoral government officials.
"My data are important to me. I shouldn't need to buy a server to prevent my data from being corrupted."
But you do nonetheless. My current machine was bought for one reason - price - and lacks it. When I've built my own systems in the past I have always used it. Scoping out parts to build a new one, I see the price of sane memory has only gotten further out of line than I remember.:(
Well, my current machine was bought to be nice, regardless of the price. I'm fed up with Windows and average PC build quality, so I got a MacBook. It has everything that I want, except for ECC RAM. No current laptop has ECC RAM. I can't shop for it even if I wanted to.
Also, Intel leaves out ECC as part of their annoying product differentiation strategy.
I think it will take somebody super-rich and super-influential to make ECC happen. Just like nobody had decent iGPUs or high-resolution displays until Apple made it a priority.
I've been upset about the lack of ECC for a long time, now. Chipset makers know how to build it. High-performance computing systems use it. It should be ubiquitous. But no, you still have to pay a big premium for ECC. At this point, RAM is the only part of a typical PC that does not have checksums.
The original justification for leaving out checksums makes no sense, now. A typical 1-bit correct, 2-bit detect per 64-bit ECC has an overhead of 128MB of RAM per 1GB of usable memory. It made sense to leave that out when RAM was $100/MB. These days, computers casually come with 8GB of RAM, or 12GB of RAM, who cares about the difference. We can easily afford to add 1GB to the 8GB to make a less error-prone system.
My data are important to me. I shouldn't need to buy a server to prevent my data from being corrupted.
When I go to a high point in this city and look down, I see countless flat roofs that could easily host solar panels. Even with all the fog this city gets, that would make a significant impact on our use of non-renewable energy. But it is not to be. Homeowners tend not to like the upfront expense, they tend not to know about SolarCity, and a bunch of the homes are rented. Absent some regulation, they aren't going to install renewable energy.
I think the neatest time to add renewable energy to a building is during construction. Absent that regulation, unless the owner makes it a priority, then the architects are not going to add it to the plan. For example, my work place recently commissioned and moved into a new building. It has an unobstructed, south-facing, 2-story-high, 10-foot-wide window that we have to cover up on the inside to maintain the climate. My immediate thought was: Solar energy. But I had no authority; the people in charge just put a poorly designed curtain on it. It just doesn't occur to them that we could put renewables in this building.
Actually, in the current political climate, I think renewable energy gets negative publicity from these deployments. Conservatives under the thrall of Koch money see renewables as an admission of AGW, and reject it. No! That reason is stupid! And regardless of AGW, renewables will help us survive the depletion of the oil reserves! The Koch-funded people claim that there is no depletion. I live in a state of extreme pessimism.
They're called trollybusses... I was recently in San Francisco on a tour bus and they said the reason they use them is the electric motor has more torque which is needed to go up the steep hills.
That makes no sense. The diesel buses can handle some pretty steep hills. On the other hand, many trolley lines are on pretty flat areas. Especially the 14, which barely goes 500 feet up or down over a 10 mile distance.
As a regular rider, trolleys are aggravating because they're slow. If they go too fast, the wires pop off, and the driver then walks to reconnect them. Some drivers respond by driving very slowly, and the other trolleys accumulate behind them, because it's impractical for trolleys to pass each other. This is especially annoying when multiple lines share a significant segment of wires, as the 14 and 49 lines do.
I guess the trolleys are sort of nice because they have zero emissions and they're much quieter at climbing hills than the diesel buses.
I think getting rid of an AP is a stupendously short-sighted idea. Having students take more advanced courses earlier is a great idea.
The problem is that AP classes are, pretty uniformly, badly constructed. Half of the education in AP math and science courses is How to Use the TI-83 Calculator. Half of AP Computer Science is How to Program in Java. The College Board is single-handedly blocking progress in the education of technology in math and science.
I don't know about the rest of the AP classes. I also think the College Board's role in college admissions, via SAT and AP, is fragile and counterproductive.
One great thing about Unixen is how they share common interfaces. The more you change that, the less interchangeable the various Unixen become.
The init system is a very poor example of Unix common interfaces. As beelsebob and oursland point out, different Unix systems use different init systems. The Linux alternatives, upstart and systemd, were actually inspired by the clear advantages displayed by MacOS X's launchd.
And even in Linux, with SysVinit, there are different interfaces. When you want a script to run at boot, do you use update-rc.d, like Debian? Do you use rc-update like Gentoo's OpenRC? Or chkconfig like Red Hat? Or insserv like SuSE? And where do you find important details like the hostname and network configuration?
I don't find systemd to be a pleasing design, and I especially don't share their love of long command names with lots of consonants, but I think their work is very important.
I, for one, know that the narrative is far more complicated than just VC-funded rich dudes conspiring with greedy landowners to drive up rents. Also, I am well aware of the laws of supply and demand. The supply does not match the demand at all. It's much worse this time than last time, the dot-com bubble of the 1990's.
I'm even aware of a little-discussed wildcard: China. The financial system there is corrupt, and the people have no safe way to invest for retirement. The burgeoning middle class is desperate for options. You might remember how they drove the price of Bitcoin to over $1000 before the regulators caught on and outlawed Bitcoin exchanges. Well, another option is real estate. The poorer people invest in Chinese cities, fueling an unsustainable construction boom over there. The richer people invest overseas. Whenever a single-family dwelling goes on sale in San Francisco, it's immediately snapped up by a Chinese investor with cash. No need for a mortgage.
The effect is that I don't know any ordinary young people who can afford to live in San Francisco except with their parents. When people do move out, they move to South San Francisco or Oakland and commute, or further. A few people manage to win the lottery of Section 8 Housing or other subsidized housing. These ordinary people include the professionals who teach your children and staff your restaurants. High living costs are natural, but they are not sustainable and you shouldn't think of them as desirable. For one thing, making all your workers commute is bad for the environment.
Some San Francisco natives work in tech. For the rest, this is not a good situation.
Bill Shockley was the originator of the Silicon Valley arrogant genius archetype. One of the co-inventors of the transistor, he convinced an electronics entrepreneur in the Los Angeles area to pay him to set up a semiconductor laboratory near his mother's home in Palo Alto, staffed with young geniuses. Then his abrasive management drove them away, leading them to found Fairchild Semiconductor, followed by Intel, AMD, and other, less important, electronics companies in the area. In the meanwhile, Shockley went into eugenics.
HP was already around, and Fred Terman of Stanford was encouraging entrepreneurship, but Shockley brought the "silicon" to Silicon Valley. And the arrogance.
Been looking for another router for almost a year now, and still haven't been convinced of a better one than my WRT54GL
The WRT54GL is a relic of an ancient time. Most importantly, it's a relic of a time without IPv4 address exhaustion, and without realistic demonstrations of DNS cache poisoning.
DD-WRT has support for 6in4 and 6to4, but not as much support for IPv6 over PPPoE or DHCP-PD or Sixxs.net AYIYA. I prefer OpenWRT, but I also prefer plain-text configuration via the command line, so I'm weird. OpenWRT officially dropped support for the WRT54GL in the last stable release, 12.09 from April 2013, and it didn't really work right in 10.03, either.
I've been generally pleased with routers based on the Atheros AR7161, but those are obsolete (only N300 and N600), and not that easy to find. Probably the most famous from that line is the Netgear WNDR3800, the target model for CeroWRT and the EFF Open Wireless Router. 680MHz MIPS24K, 16MB of flash, and 128MB of RAM are so luxurious after the 200MHz BMIPS3300, 16MB RAM, 4MB flash of the WRT54GL.
I wouldn't depend on Buffalo or DD-WRT. DD-WRT is tolerant of closed-source drivers, which leads to long-term maintenance problems. I prefer to look for OpenWRT support. Actual support, not that fake press-release support that Belkin-Linksys did with the WRT1900AC and its lame Marvell chipset. Actually, since the WZR-600DHP is discontinued, I wouldn't recommend any of Buffalo's products right now. I don't really recommend ASUS, either.
The WZR-600DHP is good because it's built around the Atheros AR7161. Atheros donated the driver and wireless firmware to the open-source community. The WZR-600DHP2 is a completely different device built around the Broadcom BCM4708. You can't get 40MHz channels or even the Ethernet driver to work on those things without closed-source drivers. Almost everything from ASUS is powered by Broadcom.
I'm cautiously optimistic about current-generation Qualcomm Atheros devices. The QCA9880-AR1A is no good, but the QCA9880-BR4A seems decently supported in OpenWRT. But I can't be sure until I have a device to play with.
You should care more about the firmware and driver source availability than about the manufacturer. It's because, no matter how strong and how fast your router is today, tomorrow your router is slow and obsolete. When (not if) problems are discovered with your device, the availability of updates depends on the ability to recompile the firmware.
I like my Buffalo WZR-600DHP. It came with DD-WRT, but more importantly, it was built on the Atheros AR7161, like the Netgear WNDR3800, Ubiquiti RouterStation, Mikrotik RB-450G, and several others, so I prefer to put OpenWRT on it. Sadly, this chip is several years old now, and doesn't support 802.11ac, and Broadcom offers cheaper N600-N750 chipsets, so there aren't a lot of AR7161 routers. Also, some of the early AR7161 routers are a little flaky, like the Netgear WNDR3700v1. My uncle had one where the 2.4GHz radio died.
Usually, I'm opposed to Cavium, Broadcom, and Marvell, and suspicious until proven otherwise of Qualcomm Atheros, MediaTek, and Realtek. Sadly, that means I can't recommend any 802.11ac routers. The most likely to work might be the ones with the Qualcomm Atheros QCA9558 and QCA9880-BR4A combination, like the Engenius ESR1750 and the TP-Link Archer C7 v2 (not v1). Since I don't have personal experience, and the documentation is so sparse, I can't recommend those without reservation. If I had to buy an 802.11ac router right now, I would buy one of those.
I think there is some truth to this, but there is a problem in our highly mobile society if one city teaches things in one order and another city two states away teaches things in a different order. When a student's parent's move between these two cities, their kids are screwed (for example, they may never have learned what their peers at their new school learned last year and may be bored stiff "relearning" what their peers are studying this year but they learned last year).
This is not an argument for federal education standards. This is an argument for fundamental education reforms. "Oh, I'm sorry, we can't talk about arithmetic on mixed fractions this year, because that's a 4th grade subject. This is 5th grade. We're doing geometric figures." Or whatever. What about the 5th graders who didn't really get mixed fractions last year? Many of the best mathematicians were made to feel stupid in school because they would rather think slowly than rush through all the subjects in the scheduled time.
Jo Boaler has been arguing that math education should be centered around Low Floor High Ceiling Tasks. Then it matters much less when your student enters the class, because they can learn from the activity at whatever level they've mastered. Somewhere else she argues that students should work on projects over an extended period of time.
The annoying part is that educational approaches take a very long time to see if they're really effective, so it's annoying to work out what is BS and what is useful out of the things that educational reformers say.
I think this is a horrible, bad idea because we don't really know what computer science is. It's such a young discipline that many of the important pioneers are still around.
Well, the very first generation, the people who figured out how dancing machinery could represent arbitrary mathematical operations, those people died a generation ago. But many of the foundations of modern computer science, those were pretty arbitrary, and those people are either still around or recently dead: John McCarthy of LISP (1927-2011), Donald Knuth of sequential algorithms (TAOCP, b. 1938), Douglas Engelbart of the human-centered GUI (NLS, 1925-2013), Claude Shannon of Information Theory (1916-2001), Paul Baran of packet networking (1926-2011), Edsger Dijkstra of structured programming (1930-2002), John Backus and Peter Naur of programming language specification (BNF, 1924-2007 and b. 1928), and so on.
Naturally, there are disagreements about what exactly computer science should be about. Dijkstra argued it should be fundamentally mathematical, and forbade students in his intro to CS class from touching a computer or trying to "run" the algorithms that they worked through. Abelson and Sussman said it should be about program structure and interpretation, and their intro to CS class uses a language intended for clarity of teaching rather than for efficient execution. Some people think it should be about algorithms, as seen in those Code.org drag-and-drop algorithm block exercises. Clearly, most people think it should be about writing programs in whatever programming language is commercially useful, so most intro to CS classes are about Java. Yuck.
Since there is this wide variety of opinions about what computer science should be about, and especially the wide gulf between what the best do (MIT, Berkeley: SICP, in Scheme or Python) versus the worst (College Board, Community Colleges: Java), I think it's very premature to ask politicians to start mandating CS across this nation. You just know, whatever they decide, it will be wrong and slow to change. Let the field shake out another generation or two, and our grandchildren will see if the subject has matured enough by then.
As with the existing technological hassles in my life, I would use a smart watch only if it did something significantly new.
In the old days (1980s), my laptop would go weeks without a battery charge. Now, my laptop barely makes it through a day, if I'm not actually using it much during that day. But my new laptop is vastly more capable, with high-DPI IPS display and 802.11ac WiFi and the ability to run a C++ compiler many times in a single hour.
In the less old days, my phone would go a bit over a week without a battery charge. Now, my phone usually makes it through a day, but not if I'm using its GPS or its processor extensively; and it's much bigger. But my new phone has a camera that doesn't entirely suck and a lot of apps, some of them useful, and visual voicemail. Still, I wouldn't have bought it if it didn't have another compelling feature: Really cheap unlimited plans.
That's 2 devices that I have to plug in every day to keep using. A smart watch would be a third. So far, I haven't heard of any compelling features. The current crop has what? The ability to show notifications. Which my phone already does when I leave it on the table next to my mouse, and which I'm already consciously choosing to ignore when I want to maintain focus. And Samsung's watch has its trademark heart rate sensor, which works only if you're not exercising.
I can imagine some uses for a smart watch, in concept, if it could do stuff independently of the phone. A camera that you don't even have to dig out of your pocket (or purse, if you have a Samsung). A communications device that you can carry without pockets. A security/control device (if it doesn't come from Google, Apple, or Microsoft, and runs free software). The concept is interesting. It just needs good execution.
The main purpose of AP Statistics (and AP Calculus) seems to be to teach limited subsets of the functionality of the TI-89 calculator series. The programmability features of that calculator are never taught in American schools.
Not that AP Computer Science is much better. Its main purpose seems to be to teach the Serious Programming Language du Jour, currently Java. Any algorithmic learning has to happen in between the struggles with that language.
I'm not pleased with the College Board's position in American society.
Richard Stallman is full of crap if he is claiming that Windows is endemically, technically less secure. Anyone remember the Pwn2Own games? Anyone remember what OS fell first every time? Thats right, fully patched OSX (think that changed ~2012). This could turn into a debate lasting days, but suffice it to say that from a technical level Windows is pretty secure.
You totally misunderstand Stallman's point. Stallman is not arguing that open source leads to better quality software. That would be Eric Raymond. Stallman is arguing that you can't trust Microsoft. More of an Auguste Kirchhoffs interpretation. And I don't see what OSX has to do with free software.
Stallman objects to closed source philosophically, and Windows especially. In addition to being proprietary, Stallman is arguing that Windows has features to report your use of Microsoft software and potentially lock you out (Windows Activation), to add or delete software without warning (Windows Update), to track you across any device around the world (Microsoft Account), and to keep you from using the computer in inappropriate ways (Protected Media Path,Driver Signing,Secure Boot). I don't see how he's wrong.
Somebody in the Chinese government seems to have noticed, and is now trying to get Windows banned there.
My hope is that all who take this like will grow up and abandon their zealotry before they enter the workforce.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
I know this is a joke, but seriously I think our houses are much more efficient that it used to be. I have no idea how much an old tube TV cost to run, but the new 40" tvs are rated at about $10 a year.... So really as we move to solid state we are going to increasingly see significant reduction in electricity usage, of course offset by more technology.
Yes, that was Jon's point, and it has been observed by economists as the Jevons paradox. As we get greater efficiency, we use more. An old TV was terribly inefficient, but you generally had only the one, and it wasn't running all day. Now, a typical house has a TV in every inhabited room.
The real fun will begin if electric cars and distributed renewable energy become popular. Then household electricity consumption trends could become extremely nonlinear for a while.
Seems to me LibreSSL is the way to go, but I can also see why the corporations would just use it as a side-stream for hints on what to fix. They have enough resources to rewrite openSSL from the inside rather than the the LibreSSL tear-down approach.
I don't think companies really "have enough resources" to rewrite OpenSSL. The problem is that you can't just throw money at a project and have stuff happen. You need people to implement those changes. And we're still in the clutches of the software crisis.
The problem with OpenSSL is that it is really, really bad code. It's security code, which few people have the expertise to handle. It has an idiosyncratic style, which few people want to look at, it's so painful. And it is so littered with backwards compatibility hacks and defective functions that very few people can know whether it's doing something right. Even the OpenSSL people don't know what it's doing, given all the comments about OpenSSL functions that they're not using properly.
So, best of luck to the CII, trying to "improve" OpenSSL without getting rid of all its weirdness. I think the OpenBSD people are right, and they should just tear down everything and rebuild it.
We have that; it's called XMPP.... open standards...
XMPP is almost as centralized as Twitter. You still communicate through a server that can be shut down. The only difference is that, if you lose access to one server, you can switch to another server, or start your own if you have enough money. (The other difference is that XMPP is not a broadcast medium.)
A proper uncensorable platform would be peer-to-peer. That's where IPv4's lack of true end-to-end connectivity has irritated me for years. There are attempts to work around this problem using, for example, BitTorrent's distributed hash table protocol or Bitcoin's blockchain or both or Onion routing. The problem is that there is no money in a truly peer-to-peer communications system, so development has always been slower than centralized systems.
It seems that no matter which party we vote for, we get either corporate-funded stooges or patronizing paternalists, like Dianne Feinstein of California. The media are complicit in this miscarriage of justice with their anointed "serious" candidates and "wasted" votes, for various reasons probably including the high amounts of money that they receive during campaigns.
So, what do you think about Larry Lessig and his change of focus from free culture to Congressional corruption?
You mean this GnuTLS? (It had a "goto cleanup" bug similar to Apple's "goto fail" bug.) It isn't API compatible with OpenSSL, and OpenSSL came first. OpenSSL has first mover advantage, and more people are paranoid about GPL, even if it's LGPL.
The consensus among security experts seems to be that TLS (the protocol itself) sucks, OpenSSL sucks, GnuTLS sucks, NSS sucks, and TLS has horrible compatibility problems between implementations. They aren't giving us a lot of options, here.
So, I find it fascinating that OpenBSD is taking OpenSSL (which sucks) and trying to make LibreSSL into something that doesn't suck. I wish them the best of luck and funding.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, I'd rather store stuff on my own machines than SpiderOak. A cursory read of how some SpiderOak features work doesn't give me confidence that it's an especially secure option once you start sharing files. But it's still much better than leaving everything in plaintext in Dropbox. I just link to them as an alternate to one of the panel's participants, where the alternate is actually viable already.
If Google and Facebook made the same claims as SpiderOak, then I'd be inclined to trust. There are laws about truth in advertising, and they have a history of following through in the limited areas where they do provide security: SSL for everyone, and certificate pinning in Google's web browser. Privacy also totally wrecks their business model, so I don't expect them to do so.
My problem is that I want to control my data by placing it on systems under my control. Storing everything on Google is fine for Eric Schmidt because Eric Schmidt owns (many shares and a significant amount of control) of Google. Storing everything on Google is not so good for me because I don't.
And that's the real issue. Google and Facebook's entire business model is to violate my privacy. I don't know if Dropbox does anything with your data, but they've definitely chosen convenience over security. I'd rather store my stuff on SpiderOak than Dropbox. As long as my data are available to somebody other than me, then my data are vulnerable to hackers and immoral government officials.
"My data are important to me. I shouldn't need to buy a server to prevent my data from being corrupted."
But you do nonetheless. My current machine was bought for one reason - price - and lacks it. When I've built my own systems in the past I have always used it. Scoping out parts to build a new one, I see the price of sane memory has only gotten further out of line than I remember. :(
Well, my current machine was bought to be nice, regardless of the price. I'm fed up with Windows and average PC build quality, so I got a MacBook. It has everything that I want, except for ECC RAM. No current laptop has ECC RAM. I can't shop for it even if I wanted to.
Also, Intel leaves out ECC as part of their annoying product differentiation strategy.
I think it will take somebody super-rich and super-influential to make ECC happen. Just like nobody had decent iGPUs or high-resolution displays until Apple made it a priority.
Isn't this what ECC RAM is for?
Hah! You wish!
I've been upset about the lack of ECC for a long time, now. Chipset makers know how to build it. High-performance computing systems use it. It should be ubiquitous. But no, you still have to pay a big premium for ECC. At this point, RAM is the only part of a typical PC that does not have checksums.
The original justification for leaving out checksums makes no sense, now. A typical 1-bit correct, 2-bit detect per 64-bit ECC has an overhead of 128MB of RAM per 1GB of usable memory. It made sense to leave that out when RAM was $100/MB. These days, computers casually come with 8GB of RAM, or 12GB of RAM, who cares about the difference. We can easily afford to add 1GB to the 8GB to make a less error-prone system.
My data are important to me. I shouldn't need to buy a server to prevent my data from being corrupted.
When I go to a high point in this city and look down, I see countless flat roofs that could easily host solar panels. Even with all the fog this city gets, that would make a significant impact on our use of non-renewable energy. But it is not to be. Homeowners tend not to like the upfront expense, they tend not to know about SolarCity, and a bunch of the homes are rented. Absent some regulation, they aren't going to install renewable energy.
I think the neatest time to add renewable energy to a building is during construction. Absent that regulation, unless the owner makes it a priority, then the architects are not going to add it to the plan. For example, my work place recently commissioned and moved into a new building. It has an unobstructed, south-facing, 2-story-high, 10-foot-wide window that we have to cover up on the inside to maintain the climate. My immediate thought was: Solar energy. But I had no authority; the people in charge just put a poorly designed curtain on it. It just doesn't occur to them that we could put renewables in this building.
Actually, in the current political climate, I think renewable energy gets negative publicity from these deployments. Conservatives under the thrall of Koch money see renewables as an admission of AGW, and reject it. No! That reason is stupid! And regardless of AGW, renewables will help us survive the depletion of the oil reserves! The Koch-funded people claim that there is no depletion. I live in a state of extreme pessimism.
They're called trollybusses... I was recently in San Francisco on a tour bus and they said the reason they use them is the electric motor has more torque which is needed to go up the steep hills.
That makes no sense. The diesel buses can handle some pretty steep hills. On the other hand, many trolley lines are on pretty flat areas. Especially the 14, which barely goes 500 feet up or down over a 10 mile distance.
As a regular rider, trolleys are aggravating because they're slow. If they go too fast, the wires pop off, and the driver then walks to reconnect them. Some drivers respond by driving very slowly, and the other trolleys accumulate behind them, because it's impractical for trolleys to pass each other. This is especially annoying when multiple lines share a significant segment of wires, as the 14 and 49 lines do.
I guess the trolleys are sort of nice because they have zero emissions and they're much quieter at climbing hills than the diesel buses.
I think getting rid of an AP is a stupendously short-sighted idea. Having students take more advanced courses earlier is a great idea.
The problem is that AP classes are, pretty uniformly, badly constructed. Half of the education in AP math and science courses is How to Use the TI-83 Calculator. Half of AP Computer Science is How to Program in Java. The College Board is single-handedly blocking progress in the education of technology in math and science.
I don't know about the rest of the AP classes. I also think the College Board's role in college admissions, via SAT and AP, is fragile and counterproductive.
One great thing about Unixen is how they share common interfaces. The more you change that, the less interchangeable the various Unixen become.
The init system is a very poor example of Unix common interfaces. As beelsebob and oursland point out, different Unix systems use different init systems. The Linux alternatives, upstart and systemd, were actually inspired by the clear advantages displayed by MacOS X's launchd.
And even in Linux, with SysVinit, there are different interfaces. When you want a script to run at boot, do you use update-rc.d, like Debian? Do you use rc-update like Gentoo's OpenRC? Or chkconfig like Red Hat? Or insserv like SuSE? And where do you find important details like the hostname and network configuration?
I don't find systemd to be a pleasing design, and I especially don't share their love of long command names with lots of consonants, but I think their work is very important.
It's still frustrating for the residents here.
I, for one, know that the narrative is far more complicated than just VC-funded rich dudes conspiring with greedy landowners to drive up rents. Also, I am well aware of the laws of supply and demand. The supply does not match the demand at all. It's much worse this time than last time, the dot-com bubble of the 1990's.
I'm even aware of a little-discussed wildcard: China. The financial system there is corrupt, and the people have no safe way to invest for retirement. The burgeoning middle class is desperate for options. You might remember how they drove the price of Bitcoin to over $1000 before the regulators caught on and outlawed Bitcoin exchanges. Well, another option is real estate. The poorer people invest in Chinese cities, fueling an unsustainable construction boom over there. The richer people invest overseas. Whenever a single-family dwelling goes on sale in San Francisco, it's immediately snapped up by a Chinese investor with cash. No need for a mortgage.
The effect is that I don't know any ordinary young people who can afford to live in San Francisco except with their parents. When people do move out, they move to South San Francisco or Oakland and commute, or further. A few people manage to win the lottery of Section 8 Housing or other subsidized housing. These ordinary people include the professionals who teach your children and staff your restaurants. High living costs are natural, but they are not sustainable and you shouldn't think of them as desirable. For one thing, making all your workers commute is bad for the environment.
Some San Francisco natives work in tech. For the rest, this is not a good situation.
Bill Shockley was the originator of the Silicon Valley arrogant genius archetype. One of the co-inventors of the transistor, he convinced an electronics entrepreneur in the Los Angeles area to pay him to set up a semiconductor laboratory near his mother's home in Palo Alto, staffed with young geniuses. Then his abrasive management drove them away, leading them to found Fairchild Semiconductor, followed by Intel, AMD, and other, less important, electronics companies in the area. In the meanwhile, Shockley went into eugenics.
HP was already around, and Fred Terman of Stanford was encouraging entrepreneurship, but Shockley brought the "silicon" to Silicon Valley. And the arrogance.
Been looking for another router for almost a year now, and still haven't been convinced of a better one than my WRT54GL
The WRT54GL is a relic of an ancient time. Most importantly, it's a relic of a time without IPv4 address exhaustion, and without realistic demonstrations of DNS cache poisoning.
DD-WRT has support for 6in4 and 6to4, but not as much support for IPv6 over PPPoE or DHCP-PD or Sixxs.net AYIYA. I prefer OpenWRT, but I also prefer plain-text configuration via the command line, so I'm weird. OpenWRT officially dropped support for the WRT54GL in the last stable release, 12.09 from April 2013, and it didn't really work right in 10.03, either.
I've been generally pleased with routers based on the Atheros AR7161, but those are obsolete (only N300 and N600), and not that easy to find. Probably the most famous from that line is the Netgear WNDR3800, the target model for CeroWRT and the EFF Open Wireless Router. 680MHz MIPS24K, 16MB of flash, and 128MB of RAM are so luxurious after the 200MHz BMIPS3300, 16MB RAM, 4MB flash of the WRT54GL.
I wouldn't depend on Buffalo or DD-WRT. DD-WRT is tolerant of closed-source drivers, which leads to long-term maintenance problems. I prefer to look for OpenWRT support. Actual support, not that fake press-release support that Belkin-Linksys did with the WRT1900AC and its lame Marvell chipset. Actually, since the WZR-600DHP is discontinued, I wouldn't recommend any of Buffalo's products right now. I don't really recommend ASUS, either.
The WZR-600DHP is good because it's built around the Atheros AR7161. Atheros donated the driver and wireless firmware to the open-source community. The WZR-600DHP2 is a completely different device built around the Broadcom BCM4708. You can't get 40MHz channels or even the Ethernet driver to work on those things without closed-source drivers. Almost everything from ASUS is powered by Broadcom.
I'm cautiously optimistic about current-generation Qualcomm Atheros devices. The QCA9880-AR1A is no good, but the QCA9880-BR4A seems decently supported in OpenWRT. But I can't be sure until I have a device to play with.
You should care more about the firmware and driver source availability than about the manufacturer. It's because, no matter how strong and how fast your router is today, tomorrow your router is slow and obsolete. When (not if) problems are discovered with your device, the availability of updates depends on the ability to recompile the firmware.
I like my Buffalo WZR-600DHP. It came with DD-WRT, but more importantly, it was built on the Atheros AR7161, like the Netgear WNDR3800, Ubiquiti RouterStation, Mikrotik RB-450G, and several others, so I prefer to put OpenWRT on it. Sadly, this chip is several years old now, and doesn't support 802.11ac, and Broadcom offers cheaper N600-N750 chipsets, so there aren't a lot of AR7161 routers. Also, some of the early AR7161 routers are a little flaky, like the Netgear WNDR3700v1. My uncle had one where the 2.4GHz radio died.
Usually, I'm opposed to Cavium, Broadcom, and Marvell, and suspicious until proven otherwise of Qualcomm Atheros, MediaTek, and Realtek. Sadly, that means I can't recommend any 802.11ac routers. The most likely to work might be the ones with the Qualcomm Atheros QCA9558 and QCA9880-BR4A combination, like the Engenius ESR1750 and the TP-Link Archer C7 v2 (not v1). Since I don't have personal experience, and the documentation is so sparse, I can't recommend those without reservation. If I had to buy an 802.11ac router right now, I would buy one of those.
I think there is some truth to this, but there is a problem in our highly mobile society if one city teaches things in one order and another city two states away teaches things in a different order. When a student's parent's move between these two cities, their kids are screwed (for example, they may never have learned what their peers at their new school learned last year and may be bored stiff "relearning" what their peers are studying this year but they learned last year).
This is not an argument for federal education standards. This is an argument for fundamental education reforms. "Oh, I'm sorry, we can't talk about arithmetic on mixed fractions this year, because that's a 4th grade subject. This is 5th grade. We're doing geometric figures." Or whatever. What about the 5th graders who didn't really get mixed fractions last year? Many of the best mathematicians were made to feel stupid in school because they would rather think slowly than rush through all the subjects in the scheduled time.
Jo Boaler has been arguing that math education should be centered around Low Floor High Ceiling Tasks. Then it matters much less when your student enters the class, because they can learn from the activity at whatever level they've mastered. Somewhere else she argues that students should work on projects over an extended period of time.
The annoying part is that educational approaches take a very long time to see if they're really effective, so it's annoying to work out what is BS and what is useful out of the things that educational reformers say.
I think this is a horrible, bad idea because we don't really know what computer science is. It's such a young discipline that many of the important pioneers are still around.
Well, the very first generation, the people who figured out how dancing machinery could represent arbitrary mathematical operations, those people died a generation ago. But many of the foundations of modern computer science, those were pretty arbitrary, and those people are either still around or recently dead: John McCarthy of LISP (1927-2011), Donald Knuth of sequential algorithms (TAOCP, b. 1938), Douglas Engelbart of the human-centered GUI (NLS, 1925-2013), Claude Shannon of Information Theory (1916-2001), Paul Baran of packet networking (1926-2011), Edsger Dijkstra of structured programming (1930-2002), John Backus and Peter Naur of programming language specification (BNF, 1924-2007 and b. 1928), and so on.
Naturally, there are disagreements about what exactly computer science should be about. Dijkstra argued it should be fundamentally mathematical, and forbade students in his intro to CS class from touching a computer or trying to "run" the algorithms that they worked through. Abelson and Sussman said it should be about program structure and interpretation, and their intro to CS class uses a language intended for clarity of teaching rather than for efficient execution. Some people think it should be about algorithms, as seen in those Code.org drag-and-drop algorithm block exercises. Clearly, most people think it should be about writing programs in whatever programming language is commercially useful, so most intro to CS classes are about Java. Yuck.
Since there is this wide variety of opinions about what computer science should be about, and especially the wide gulf between what the best do (MIT, Berkeley: SICP, in Scheme or Python) versus the worst (College Board, Community Colleges: Java), I think it's very premature to ask politicians to start mandating CS across this nation. You just know, whatever they decide, it will be wrong and slow to change. Let the field shake out another generation or two, and our grandchildren will see if the subject has matured enough by then.
As with the existing technological hassles in my life, I would use a smart watch only if it did something significantly new.
In the old days (1980s), my laptop would go weeks without a battery charge. Now, my laptop barely makes it through a day, if I'm not actually using it much during that day. But my new laptop is vastly more capable, with high-DPI IPS display and 802.11ac WiFi and the ability to run a C++ compiler many times in a single hour.
In the less old days, my phone would go a bit over a week without a battery charge. Now, my phone usually makes it through a day, but not if I'm using its GPS or its processor extensively; and it's much bigger. But my new phone has a camera that doesn't entirely suck and a lot of apps, some of them useful, and visual voicemail. Still, I wouldn't have bought it if it didn't have another compelling feature: Really cheap unlimited plans.
That's 2 devices that I have to plug in every day to keep using. A smart watch would be a third. So far, I haven't heard of any compelling features. The current crop has what? The ability to show notifications. Which my phone already does when I leave it on the table next to my mouse, and which I'm already consciously choosing to ignore when I want to maintain focus. And Samsung's watch has its trademark heart rate sensor, which works only if you're not exercising.
I can imagine some uses for a smart watch, in concept, if it could do stuff independently of the phone. A camera that you don't even have to dig out of your pocket (or purse, if you have a Samsung). A communications device that you can carry without pockets. A security/control device (if it doesn't come from Google, Apple, or Microsoft, and runs free software). The concept is interesting. It just needs good execution.
The main purpose of AP Statistics (and AP Calculus) seems to be to teach limited subsets of the functionality of the TI-89 calculator series. The programmability features of that calculator are never taught in American schools.
Not that AP Computer Science is much better. Its main purpose seems to be to teach the Serious Programming Language du Jour, currently Java. Any algorithmic learning has to happen in between the struggles with that language.
I'm not pleased with the College Board's position in American society.
I refuse to build a Connected Home without Free Software. Imagine the security nightmares of SCADA and consumer electronics, together at last.
This has to apply to the drivers and the peripheral firmware, too, because the Linux kernel has its own vulnerabilities.
Richard Stallman is full of crap if he is claiming that Windows is endemically, technically less secure. Anyone remember the Pwn2Own games? Anyone remember what OS fell first every time? Thats right, fully patched OSX (think that changed ~2012). This could turn into a debate lasting days, but suffice it to say that from a technical level Windows is pretty secure.
You totally misunderstand Stallman's point. Stallman is not arguing that open source leads to better quality software. That would be Eric Raymond. Stallman is arguing that you can't trust Microsoft. More of an Auguste Kirchhoffs interpretation. And I don't see what OSX has to do with free software.
Stallman objects to closed source philosophically, and Windows especially. In addition to being proprietary, Stallman is arguing that Windows has features to report your use of Microsoft software and potentially lock you out (Windows Activation), to add or delete software without warning (Windows Update), to track you across any device around the world (Microsoft Account), and to keep you from using the computer in inappropriate ways (Protected Media Path, Driver Signing, Secure Boot). I don't see how he's wrong.
Somebody in the Chinese government seems to have noticed, and is now trying to get Windows banned there.
My hope is that all who take this like will grow up and abandon their zealotry before they enter the workforce.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
I know this is a joke, but seriously I think our houses are much more efficient that it used to be. I have no idea how much an old tube TV cost to run, but the new 40" tvs are rated at about $10 a year. ... So really as we move to solid state we are going to increasingly see significant reduction in electricity usage, of course offset by more technology.
Yes, that was Jon's point, and it has been observed by economists as the Jevons paradox. As we get greater efficiency, we use more. An old TV was terribly inefficient, but you generally had only the one, and it wasn't running all day. Now, a typical house has a TV in every inhabited room.
The real fun will begin if electric cars and distributed renewable energy become popular. Then household electricity consumption trends could become extremely nonlinear for a while.
Seems to me LibreSSL is the way to go, but I can also see why the corporations would just use it as a side-stream for hints on what to fix. They have enough resources to rewrite openSSL from the inside rather than the the LibreSSL tear-down approach.
I don't think companies really "have enough resources" to rewrite OpenSSL. The problem is that you can't just throw money at a project and have stuff happen. You need people to implement those changes. And we're still in the clutches of the software crisis.
The problem with OpenSSL is that it is really, really bad code. It's security code, which few people have the expertise to handle. It has an idiosyncratic style, which few people want to look at, it's so painful. And it is so littered with backwards compatibility hacks and defective functions that very few people can know whether it's doing something right. Even the OpenSSL people don't know what it's doing, given all the comments about OpenSSL functions that they're not using properly.
So, best of luck to the CII, trying to "improve" OpenSSL without getting rid of all its weirdness. I think the OpenBSD people are right, and they should just tear down everything and rebuild it.
We have that; it's called XMPP. ... open standards ...
XMPP is almost as centralized as Twitter. You still communicate through a server that can be shut down. The only difference is that, if you lose access to one server, you can switch to another server, or start your own if you have enough money. (The other difference is that XMPP is not a broadcast medium.)
A proper uncensorable platform would be peer-to-peer. That's where IPv4's lack of true end-to-end connectivity has irritated me for years. There are attempts to work around this problem using, for example, BitTorrent's distributed hash table protocol or Bitcoin's blockchain or both or Onion routing. The problem is that there is no money in a truly peer-to-peer communications system, so development has always been slower than centralized systems.
The shackles of wealth, then?
Heavy is the head that bears the crown.
That refers to the burden of being a ruler. Has nothing to do with wealth.
What difference does that make in contemporary capitalism?
It seems that no matter which party we vote for, we get either corporate-funded stooges or patronizing paternalists, like Dianne Feinstein of California. The media are complicit in this miscarriage of justice with their anointed "serious" candidates and "wasted" votes, for various reasons probably including the high amounts of money that they receive during campaigns.
So, what do you think about Larry Lessig and his change of focus from free culture to Congressional corruption?
You mean this GnuTLS? (It had a "goto cleanup" bug similar to Apple's "goto fail" bug.) It isn't API compatible with OpenSSL, and OpenSSL came first. OpenSSL has first mover advantage, and more people are paranoid about GPL, even if it's LGPL.
The consensus among security experts seems to be that TLS (the protocol itself) sucks, OpenSSL sucks, GnuTLS sucks, NSS sucks, and TLS has horrible compatibility problems between implementations. They aren't giving us a lot of options, here.
So, I find it fascinating that OpenBSD is taking OpenSSL (which sucks) and trying to make LibreSSL into something that doesn't suck. I wish them the best of luck and funding.