HTC One (m8) is another good Android phone. HTC's UI is pretty close to stock and very light on its feet compared to some others. It even got upgraded to Lollipop a while ago with no issues.
For more details, search for "rolling sphere" lighting protection system design. The idea is that if you roll a sphere of size X (usually 150ft or 45.7m) across the points of the masts, the area below the ball will be ~95% protected against a strike of power level Y. That is, any leader passing through the sphere will be more attracted to the mast, then to something below that point.
But not launching on the exact instant when the ISS inclination is properly aligned with the launch site is expensive. The shuttle launches had to sacrifice 1100kg of payload in order to have a 10 minute wide launch window.
For a robotic launch where you can easily safe the vehicle after a scrub and don't have to unload passengers from the capsule, delaying 23h37m is not a huge deal. So you go with a much shorter launch window and gain a lot more payload to orbit. And if things don't go as planned, you scrub for a day and try again.
+/- 5 minutes was the shuttle's window and it cost 1100kg of payload to have a window that large (reference link).
The dog-leg cost of slipping into the proper inclination orbit with a launch that is mistimed can huge. On the order of hundreds of dV required to fix the issue.
So for robotic launches, where you don't have crew sitting in a capsule / vessel, and scrubs are relatively cheap as a result, it's better to go for a very small launch window (~1 second) to maximize payload.
If that's the opinion that you hold, then why don't you go do business with a bank that doesn't lock its vault, or use HTTPS, leave your door unlocked when you go away on vacation or to the office every day, and leave all of your mail open and stapled to your front door?
After all, since the big guys can read your mail or bust down your door, it doesn't make sense to take basic security precautions.
- Centralized repository model, which is simpler and for less technical users makes it less likely that they will screw up. Once something is committed to the SVN server, you can back it up and not worry that you have portions of your data not covered by backups. Plus you get monotonically increasing version numbers, which non-techies find easier to digest.
- Excellent at handling binary files. Like MSOffice files, or LibreOffice, or images, or other binary assets. We have a few repositories that are 5+ GB.
- Only bring down what you need locally, not the entire repository. SVN has the concept of "sparse" checkouts where you only bring down the folders that you need, not the entire repository.
The downside is poorer merge support (an ongoing battle which they work on in each release) and there is no way to do commits if the link to the server is down.
WinXP went out of EOL about a year ago. Usage is down to about 16%. And they can use alternative browsers or SSL libraries to deal with SNI. At this point, anyone left on WinXP is not worth the cost of support.
Android 3.0 came out in 2011. Only 7.3% of Android devices run a version older then 4.0.
At some point, you have to draw a line in the sand and say "we will not support that". Those older devices are insecure, don't support modern features, and increase your support and development costs by a large amount. If you can reach 90% of your audience for X cost, trying to reach 99% for X*10 or X*100 is not worth it.
It's the same deal as HTML5. Two years ago? It would have been near-suicide to base your website solely on HTML5. Today? There's no reason not to go 100% HTML5.
SNI support is now widespread enough that you don't need to worry about it.
HTTPS (SSL) alone will not stop attacks like this where any registrar trusted by the browser can issue certificates for any site that they want to.
HTTPS combined with DNSSEC + DANE would stop attacks like this. Because now the domain owner can say a few things:
- This is the only CA allowed to issue certificates for my domain
- My certificate is X, and not anything else
In short - admins need to put pressure on their DNS providers to provide DNSSEC for their domain records, after which DANE can be used to provide security for the SSL certificates associated with your domain.
For sites where you don't care if you get locked out for a few hours or days - password managers are just fine. (Just like anything else -- keep backups in a different format / location / etc.)
I belong to maybe 2-3 dozen forums (or more). All of them use random 20-30 character passwords and I just let the browser remember it (with a backup copy in a GPG encrypted text file). There's no point in my trying to memorize those passwords - and using a password manager means I don't have the same password in use in multiple places.
Use them for high security things like your primary email or bank accounts? Eh, better to rely on paper records stored in a fire resistant safe.
Typical NTP from the public pool seems to be anywhere from 0.5ms to 2.5ms. Which is good enough for practical purposes for most things.
With luck, good components, and good climate control, you can usually manage to keep an internal LAN within about 1/5th of a millisecond. Maybe 1/10th if everything is well behaved.
What's wrong with Windows 7 that makes you want to upgrade?
Nothing, other then the problem that it will stop getting updates within the next few years. So if you want to continue to receive security updates, you have to move to Win10.
Which, fortunately for Microsoft, is getting good press and good reception unlike Win8.
Trying to keep track of what features came with WinVista X vs Y vs Z (or Win7 SKUs or Win 8.1 with five different SKUs) was very consumer-hostile. Consumers got confused and annoyed. Plus there was a huge cost difference between the top-end SKU and the home edition.
There should only have been (1) version of Windows 7 -- with all of the bells and whistles included in Enterprise/Ultimate/DaddyGates editions -- for a maximum of about $60 per copy, or $30/copy if purchased in a 5-pack.
People would then have upgraded in much larger numbers from WinXP to Win7. Instead, because Microsoft got greedy in the prices it charged for the OpSys, people started looking at alternatives.
Back in the early 2000s, a decent rig would run you $1500-$1800 and a $100 license on top of that wasn't too big of a deal. Ten years later, a decent rig is about $600, but the cost of the operating system has gone up to $150. Microsoft is asking people to pay 25% of the computer's value for the Operating System instead of under 10%.
Multiple certificates (SNI) over a single SSL IP address/port is a mostly solved issue. The only outliers are:
WinXP users still using Internet Explorer (Firefox/Chrome are workarounds), but WinXP is out of support for a year now -- so maybe you should stop pandering to them.
Older versions of Android and iOS - we're talking really old versions (Android 2.x, iOS 3).
Older versions of Windows IIS before 8.x - but Win2003 servers go out of support this coming year, so you should be migrating off.
Two to three years ago, SNI was not well supported and not worth enabling, but things have changed enough that you should forge ahead.
We've had a functionally equivalent capability with Shorewall + LSM (Link Status Monitor) for years now. Setup (2) ISP connections, route a proportion of your traffic to each one and when the link goes down, all traffic goes to the other link.
The hard part of the equation is your public DNS records that need to change to whichever IP address is "active" (or round-robin between the two). But most DNS service providers have a solution for that as well.
Naturally, it's not as seamless as multi-path, but it works without needing a BGP entry or your own IP address block in the public routing tables.
eInk readers are perfect for linear reading, such as fiction / non-fiction / stories / etc. I do all of my leisure reading (i.e. fiction) on either my Sony reader or on my 10" tablet. But they are not so good for reference works where you need to flip pages a lot or deal with lots of diagrams.
Reference works, such as books on technical topics, I usually resort to reading them on the 27" display on my desktop (although some are passable on a 10" tablet). The main reason I buy those in electronic from is for search and space savings on my bookshelf.
I'm still moderately happy with the modern Thinkpad T series that we've purchased for others in the office (T440 series). Not sure that it will live up to my T61p in terms of longevity (7.5 years old now).
Guess I'll find out when I replace my laptop next year.
The important things to me are reliability, longevity, 4-5 year warranty, 16-32GB of RAM, Intel i7, docking station, and two internal drive bays.
I suspect the market isn't there yet for 4 TB SSD drives... and it wouldn't require a 3.5" drive case, you could fit 4 TB of NAND easily in a 2.5" drive case (or even less).
Well right now, the 1TB enterprise quality SSDs have dropped below $900 (5 year warranty, super-caps, etc.). They're quickly edging out the 15k RPM SAS drives.
Consider that if I need X IOPS and a TB of capacity, I can either put 2x1TB SSD into a server and spend about $1800-ish. Or I can buy a more expensive RAID controller and try to put together half a dozen to a full dozen 15k RPM SAS drives. Using SSD means less drives, less power, less heat, smaller server footprint - same or better IOPS (usually 10x better).
The magical price point for enterprise storage drives is about $300-$600 per drive. Business IT won't blink at spending $300-$600 on a single drive, especially if it reduces their spindle count and increases performance. Something in the $1500-$2000 range tends to be a rarer purchase.
I've never been impressed with how he kept trying to turn Planetside 2 into a clone of Battlefield / Call of Duty rather then play to its strengths and uniqueness.
Because of that mismanagement, the game is still in an unfinished state two years after release, and core game elements have been revamped multiple times.
That and the issue that the PS2 devs can't seem to push out a single patch without breaking multiple other things -- and then leave it in a broken state for weeks and months at a time.
Sadly, the people in charge of making those bad decisions probably weren't the ones let go today.
Asus (and a lot of other manufs) had trouble with bad caps all the way up until ~2007 give or take. When they go, it is a very loud pop (along with the smell of electricity arcing) that will make you jump if you are in the same room.
I've had quite a few fanless video cards with bad capacitors, along with a few motherboards from the mid-2000s.
EVE seems to be doing OK, and while there's war to participate in if you want to, there are plenty of people making money from mining, research, logistics, and so on.
All activities in EVE (other then agent-driven mission running) are PvP. Selling on the market? You're PvPing against the other sellers who want to undercut you and sell their product faster. Mining? You're competing to harvest before someone else comes and harvests the resource.
One unit per tile (1UT) sucks on the Civ5 maps because the hexes are way too large for the scale. The only way 1 unit/tile would have worked well would have been to subdivide the hexes into 7 smaller hexes while keeping the cities the same size (taking up multiple hexes).
The other major issue with the series is that instead of simply improving upon the Civ4 series (by adding hexes and fixing the stack of death issues and doing work on the AI), they brought in a brand new designer who threw out all the lessons of the past in order to put his mark on the product.
The result was a poor product with numerous bugs and many balance issues and a definite downgrade from Civ4's quality.
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HTC One (m8) is another good Android phone. HTC's UI is pretty close to stock and very light on its feet compared to some others. It even got upgraded to Lollipop a while ago with no issues.
Those four towers are the lightning protection system.
For more details, search for "rolling sphere" lighting protection system design. The idea is that if you roll a sphere of size X (usually 150ft or 45.7m) across the points of the masts, the area below the ball will be ~95% protected against a strike of power level Y. That is, any leader passing through the sphere will be more attracted to the mast, then to something below that point.
Yes there is margin.
But not launching on the exact instant when the ISS inclination is properly aligned with the launch site is expensive. The shuttle launches had to sacrifice 1100kg of payload in order to have a 10 minute wide launch window.
For a robotic launch where you can easily safe the vehicle after a scrub and don't have to unload passengers from the capsule, delaying 23h37m is not a huge deal. So you go with a much shorter launch window and gain a lot more payload to orbit. And if things don't go as planned, you scrub for a day and try again.
+/- 5 minutes was the shuttle's window and it cost 1100kg of payload to have a window that large (reference link).
The dog-leg cost of slipping into the proper inclination orbit with a launch that is mistimed can huge. On the order of hundreds of dV required to fix the issue.
So for robotic launches, where you don't have crew sitting in a capsule / vessel, and scrubs are relatively cheap as a result, it's better to go for a very small launch window (~1 second) to maximize payload.
Rule of law mattered more then unexploited resources.
When you look at the list of essentially failed countries that should have great wealth, all of them have very bad corruption issues.
Just because you can get away with something doesn't make it moral and/or legal and/or a good business decision.
Everything after Win7 bad . . .
Win10 looks to be a good and solid upgrade to Win7.
If that's the opinion that you hold, then why don't you go do business with a bank that doesn't lock its vault, or use HTTPS, leave your door unlocked when you go away on vacation or to the office every day, and leave all of your mail open and stapled to your front door?
After all, since the big guys can read your mail or bust down your door, it doesn't make sense to take basic security precautions.
SVN's strengths are:
- Centralized repository model, which is simpler and for less technical users makes it less likely that they will screw up. Once something is committed to the SVN server, you can back it up and not worry that you have portions of your data not covered by backups. Plus you get monotonically increasing version numbers, which non-techies find easier to digest.
- Excellent at handling binary files. Like MSOffice files, or LibreOffice, or images, or other binary assets. We have a few repositories that are 5+ GB.
- Only bring down what you need locally, not the entire repository. SVN has the concept of "sparse" checkouts where you only bring down the folders that you need, not the entire repository.
The downside is poorer merge support (an ongoing battle which they work on in each release) and there is no way to do commits if the link to the server is down.
Eh... why support such out of date clients?
WinXP went out of EOL about a year ago. Usage is down to about 16%. And they can use alternative browsers or SSL libraries to deal with SNI. At this point, anyone left on WinXP is not worth the cost of support.
Android 3.0 came out in 2011. Only 7.3% of Android devices run a version older then 4.0.
At some point, you have to draw a line in the sand and say "we will not support that". Those older devices are insecure, don't support modern features, and increase your support and development costs by a large amount. If you can reach 90% of your audience for X cost, trying to reach 99% for X*10 or X*100 is not worth it.
It's the same deal as HTML5. Two years ago? It would have been near-suicide to base your website solely on HTML5. Today? There's no reason not to go 100% HTML5.
SNI support is now widespread enough that you don't need to worry about it.
HTTPS (SSL) alone will not stop attacks like this where any registrar trusted by the browser can issue certificates for any site that they want to.
HTTPS combined with DNSSEC + DANE would stop attacks like this. Because now the domain owner can say a few things:
- This is the only CA allowed to issue certificates for my domain
- My certificate is X, and not anything else
In short - admins need to put pressure on their DNS providers to provide DNSSEC for their domain records, after which DANE can be used to provide security for the SSL certificates associated with your domain.
For sites where you don't care if you get locked out for a few hours or days - password managers are just fine. (Just like anything else -- keep backups in a different format / location / etc.)
I belong to maybe 2-3 dozen forums (or more). All of them use random 20-30 character passwords and I just let the browser remember it (with a backup copy in a GPG encrypted text file). There's no point in my trying to memorize those passwords - and using a password manager means I don't have the same password in use in multiple places.
Use them for high security things like your primary email or bank accounts? Eh, better to rely on paper records stored in a fire resistant safe.
Typical NTP from the public pool seems to be anywhere from 0.5ms to 2.5ms. Which is good enough for practical purposes for most things.
With luck, good components, and good climate control, you can usually manage to keep an internal LAN within about 1/5th of a millisecond. Maybe 1/10th if everything is well behaved.
What's wrong with Windows 7 that makes you want to upgrade?
Nothing, other then the problem that it will stop getting updates within the next few years. So if you want to continue to receive security updates, you have to move to Win10.
Which, fortunately for Microsoft, is getting good press and good reception unlike Win8.
The core issue with WinVista and later?
Too many SKUs (combined with cost).
Trying to keep track of what features came with WinVista X vs Y vs Z (or Win7 SKUs or Win 8.1 with five different SKUs) was very consumer-hostile. Consumers got confused and annoyed. Plus there was a huge cost difference between the top-end SKU and the home edition.
There should only have been (1) version of Windows 7 -- with all of the bells and whistles included in Enterprise/Ultimate/DaddyGates editions -- for a maximum of about $60 per copy, or $30/copy if purchased in a 5-pack.
People would then have upgraded in much larger numbers from WinXP to Win7. Instead, because Microsoft got greedy in the prices it charged for the OpSys, people started looking at alternatives.
Back in the early 2000s, a decent rig would run you $1500-$1800 and a $100 license on top of that wasn't too big of a deal. Ten years later, a decent rig is about $600, but the cost of the operating system has gone up to $150. Microsoft is asking people to pay 25% of the computer's value for the Operating System instead of under 10%.
Every time Microsoft talks about the free upgrade, there are always those weasel words in there about "qualified" devices. So what devices qualify?
Multiple certificates (SNI) over a single SSL IP address/port is a mostly solved issue. The only outliers are:
WinXP users still using Internet Explorer (Firefox/Chrome are workarounds), but WinXP is out of support for a year now -- so maybe you should stop pandering to them.
Older versions of Android and iOS - we're talking really old versions (Android 2.x, iOS 3).
Older versions of Windows IIS before 8.x - but Win2003 servers go out of support this coming year, so you should be migrating off.
Two to three years ago, SNI was not well supported and not worth enabling, but things have changed enough that you should forge ahead.
We've had a functionally equivalent capability with Shorewall + LSM (Link Status Monitor) for years now. Setup (2) ISP connections, route a proportion of your traffic to each one and when the link goes down, all traffic goes to the other link.
The hard part of the equation is your public DNS records that need to change to whichever IP address is "active" (or round-robin between the two). But most DNS service providers have a solution for that as well.
Naturally, it's not as seamless as multi-path, but it works without needing a BGP entry or your own IP address block in the public routing tables.
The other way around works better.
eInk readers are perfect for linear reading, such as fiction / non-fiction / stories / etc. I do all of my leisure reading (i.e. fiction) on either my Sony reader or on my 10" tablet. But they are not so good for reference works where you need to flip pages a lot or deal with lots of diagrams.
Reference works, such as books on technical topics, I usually resort to reading them on the 27" display on my desktop (although some are passable on a 10" tablet). The main reason I buy those in electronic from is for search and space savings on my bookshelf.
I'm still moderately happy with the modern Thinkpad T series that we've purchased for others in the office (T440 series). Not sure that it will live up to my T61p in terms of longevity (7.5 years old now).
Guess I'll find out when I replace my laptop next year.
The important things to me are reliability, longevity, 4-5 year warranty, 16-32GB of RAM, Intel i7, docking station, and two internal drive bays.
I suspect the market isn't there yet for 4 TB SSD drives... and it wouldn't require a 3.5" drive case, you could fit 4 TB of NAND easily in a 2.5" drive case (or even less).
Well right now, the 1TB enterprise quality SSDs have dropped below $900 (5 year warranty, super-caps, etc.). They're quickly edging out the 15k RPM SAS drives.
Consider that if I need X IOPS and a TB of capacity, I can either put 2x1TB SSD into a server and spend about $1800-ish. Or I can buy a more expensive RAID controller and try to put together half a dozen to a full dozen 15k RPM SAS drives. Using SSD means less drives, less power, less heat, smaller server footprint - same or better IOPS (usually 10x better).
The magical price point for enterprise storage drives is about $300-$600 per drive. Business IT won't blink at spending $300-$600 on a single drive, especially if it reduces their spindle count and increases performance. Something in the $1500-$2000 range tends to be a rarer purchase.
I've never been impressed with how he kept trying to turn Planetside 2 into a clone of Battlefield / Call of Duty rather then play to its strengths and uniqueness.
Because of that mismanagement, the game is still in an unfinished state two years after release, and core game elements have been revamped multiple times.
That and the issue that the PS2 devs can't seem to push out a single patch without breaking multiple other things -- and then leave it in a broken state for weeks and months at a time.
Sadly, the people in charge of making those bad decisions probably weren't the ones let go today.
Asus (and a lot of other manufs) had trouble with bad caps all the way up until ~2007 give or take. When they go, it is a very loud pop (along with the smell of electricity arcing) that will make you jump if you are in the same room.
I've had quite a few fanless video cards with bad capacitors, along with a few motherboards from the mid-2000s.
EVE seems to be doing OK, and while there's war to participate in if you want to, there are plenty of people making money from mining, research, logistics, and so on.
All activities in EVE (other then agent-driven mission running) are PvP. Selling on the market? You're PvPing against the other sellers who want to undercut you and sell their product faster. Mining? You're competing to harvest before someone else comes and harvests the resource.
One unit per tile (1UT) sucks on the Civ5 maps because the hexes are way too large for the scale. The only way 1 unit/tile would have worked well would have been to subdivide the hexes into 7 smaller hexes while keeping the cities the same size (taking up multiple hexes).
The other major issue with the series is that instead of simply improving upon the Civ4 series (by adding hexes and fixing the stack of death issues and doing work on the AI), they brought in a brand new designer who threw out all the lessons of the past in order to put his mark on the product.
The result was a poor product with numerous bugs and many balance issues and a definite downgrade from Civ4's quality.