"but directTV antennas and satellite dishes are just fine"
After a couple of legal battles, there are some federal laws that say that banning antennas and dishes in a housing development is not permitted. Many developments try to do it anyway but you can fight it if you know the right laws.
Actually it's usually the opposite - Air conditioning is almost always powered by electricity and AC load can't always be reduced with insulation (e.g. heat-generating devices need their heat removed regardless of external insulation), while heating has numerous options - gas, oil, electric, wood, downstairs neighbors, solar thermal (much cheaper and easier than PV), and upgraded insulation.
There's no chance that the publicity would be worth the cost of getting an NSA Type 1 crypto certification. The fact that RIM is Canadian doesn't help in this regard.
Also, the problem is not necessarily security of of information stored on the phone itself, but the fact that cell phones and in fact any sort of RF transmitter that isn't specifically approved for use in a classified environment will be banned in many government areas. I'm fairly certain the Oval Office (and likely a number of other sensitive locations in the White House) are such locations.
So, the bulk of your complaint is, "If my laptop is lost, someone will know my identity."
Dude - if your laptop gets stolen and the thief gets busted by the police, wouldn't you WANT identifying information on your laptop? People actually PAY to have identifying information hidden in their laptop for the purposes of theft recovery.
Most portable devices allow the owner to enter identifying information into the device - "Andy's iPod" for the purposes of recovery if a lost item is recovered by someone honest. (Actually not sure about iPods specifically, but every PDA I've owned supports this.)
As someone else commented - not even Gentoo is that fiddly. On Ubuntu I just click on a network, enter the passphrase, and boom I'm connected, it even remembers passphrases for multiple networks. Gentoo is a bit more difficult but Gentoo is for hardcore nutcases like myself.:)
For one: If your router didn't have wireless enabled to begin with, that's not the fault of Linux. You would have had to do the same with a Windows machine.
As to the cracker - what you linked to is a brute force dictionary attack program that just tries one passphrase after another until it finds one that works. Choose a better passphrase that doesn't contain real words so the cracker can't make an "educated" guess. WEP was cracked wide open, the first iteration of WPA has some degree of vulnerability (due to some features to enable WEP backwards compatibility), to my knowledge the only attack against WPA2 is to brute force it.
As to multiple networks showing up in NetworkManager, that's because everyone and their mother has a wireless router now. Unfortunately this means that there are a lot of channel conflicts, including the worse case scenario of people who chose channels not on 1, 6, or 11 (the three nonoverlapping 2.4 GHz channels - any other channel will overlap *two* of the above in a manner which makes the channel access mechanisms far less efficient.) Again, not a Linux problem but a general wifi one.
$199! How can they possibly claim "for the masses" at that price point.
I'm fairly certain it does not cost THAT much extra to make 60Hz shutter glasses (as compared to the 30Hz ones that were not even remotely close to $199, at most they typically resulted in a $20-30 price premium for the cards they were bundled with 8-10 years ago like some of the original Asus GeForce 256 cards.)
Not only that but you need a high-end 120Hz monitor. I know even the old 30Hz glasses stopped working with most LCDs back in the day when LCDs started becoming popular (which was a contributing factor to the old shutter glasses dying off.)
At least older generations of these glasses (as others have said, lower refresh rate versions were available with even the original GeForce, many were bundled by Asus) fit just fine over glasses.
The problem is that modern hard drives do automatic defect mapping. The end result is that sometimes important data can be written to a sector, and then the drive will decide that sector is unreliable and map it out. That sector can no longer be accessed in any way. As a result you have a sector which contains data but cannot be wiped because the drive won't let you write there.
Flash memory is even worse since it does write balancing between all cells to PREVENT a failure of a sector, rather than deciding a sector is on its way out and mapping around it then.
Linksys may be crappy, but at least you can install a community-supported variant of Linux on many of their router models.
Netgear is, in my experience, even crappier (as evidenced by how flaky my WPN824 was), and there are very few choices as far as open source alternative firmwares for Netgear routers. They marketed an "open source" router for a while, but I could not find a single instance of third party firmware for that router.
Sadly, Buffalo Technology refused to give into patent trolls and so their wireless products cannoy be purchased in the United States - they have some very solid hardware that makes an excellent host for DD-WRT or Tomato. In fact, I believe they have partnered with DD-WRT to improve the capabilities of DD-WRT on their firmware. My WHR-G54S rocks.
Unfortunately, so far I have only been able to find commercial software for Windows that will do this. Replay Media Catcher will save Hulu and CBS FLVs, and there is one other commercial package that will do it.
It looks like some of the open source downloader packages are adding RTMP support, so I have a feeling an OSS solution is coming soon.
Many news articles about Netflix moving to Silverlight were titled, with "Mac and Linux" in the article title, but at that point (and still), the Silverlight version of the Watch Instantly service supports only Windows and MacOS, not Linux. Linux support was planned but no news on that yet - in theory Monolight provides Silverlight support under Linux but I wouldn't be surprised if the DRM component were missing.
Interestingly enough the Flash-based system used by CBS and Hulu has no DRM (other than some rudimentary anti-ripping features) but the studios still seem to be OK. As a result they work in Linux... Sort of. Flash under Linux has insanely high system requirements for video playback. My old desktop (which is now my HTPC) can't playback directly via the site (incredibly choppy), but if I rip the video on another machine (as I said, rudimentary anti-rip), it plays back happily in mplayer on the aforementioned Athlon XP 2800 machine.
Ripping is a pain in the butt, I wish I could just playback directly on that machine. Hulu's commercials are minimally intrusive.
It's a short article from a noname news source with little to no statistical data to back it up.
I am an AT&T customer and they just did a major 3G rollout in my area (Binghamton, NY area extending all the way to Owego). My girlfriend just bought a 2G-only phone from them and has had no degradation in service (in fact she's ecstatic with the service quality compared to T-Mobile - T-Mo tells customers they can roam on AT&T where T-Mo doesn't have coverage but that capability breaks for weeks at a time, my girlfriend routinely had no service whatsoever for 90% of her commute, including anywhere near work.).
The only service degradation I have noticed is that unless forced to 2G-only, 3G-capable phones will prefer a 3G tower even if it's only one bar of signal and barely useable and the 2G tower provides full signal strength - My apartment and workplace are at the very border of the 3G area.
I'm still going through the report, but it criticizes one of Bush's initiatives (CNCI) as having its effectiveness reduced by unnecessary secrecy.
The one thing I don't like about the report is that in general, I consider the word "cyberspace" to be too buzzwordy for some of the ways the report uses, especially the "National Office for Cyberspace"... Maybe something like "National Office for Information Technology Security" or something like that?
"Something kept t2 gear from becoming dirt cheap."
The limiting factor on T2 gear prices quickly became the values of datacores required for invention. Even if the production materials were 100% free, T2 items would have been expensive due to the value of blueprints per production run.
FAVORITE OS? WHAT ARE YOU ON AND WHERE CAN I FIND SOME?
I routinely deal with VxWorks 5.x at work, and it's a nightmarish POS, especially its networking support. I'm assuming Linksys must be using 6.x or a HIGHLY customized 5.x variant with an alternative network stack for their product line, given that the standard 5.x network stack is a halfassed port the 1990 4.4BSD "Reno" release with no new features and a LOT of new bugs.
1) Demonstrating unity gain (not switching) at 26 GHz is nothing. 2) AI will likely require an approach similar to actual biological brains - massively parallel at a low clock speed.
As the article said, this is nowhere near the limit for RF transistors.
Another person pasted some of the abstract of the actual paper, and despite the article containing the words "clocked at", all that was demonstrated was unity gain (i.e. gain cutoff) at 26 GHz for an RF signal, NOT remotely close to digital switching at 26 GHz.
RF test equipment that goes to 40-50 GHz is common (albeit expensive), and specialty test equipment even higher.
Also, even if switching had been demonstrated at a given frequency, that doesn't mean a CPU at that frequency is going to happen. Even with aggressive pipelining, the propagation delay through a digital circuit will be at least 3-4 propagation delays of a single transistor or gate. As we saw with the move from the P4 to the Core 2 series, aggressive pipelining for high clock speed doesn't always work for CPUs due to the IPC penalty a long pipeline has.
I probably should have read TFA, but your excerpt from it says to me that it is indeed only signal amplification and not switching that was observed at 26 GHz.
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"but directTV antennas and satellite dishes are just fine"
After a couple of legal battles, there are some federal laws that say that banning antennas and dishes in a housing development is not permitted. Many developments try to do it anyway but you can fight it if you know the right laws.
Actually it's usually the opposite - Air conditioning is almost always powered by electricity and AC load can't always be reduced with insulation (e.g. heat-generating devices need their heat removed regardless of external insulation), while heating has numerous options - gas, oil, electric, wood, downstairs neighbors, solar thermal (much cheaper and easier than PV), and upgraded insulation.
California residents... Cal is notorious for having very expensive electricity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VH-71_Kestrel - Multibillion dollar contract to keep the President connected during just a short part of his travels.
There's no chance that the publicity would be worth the cost of getting an NSA Type 1 crypto certification. The fact that RIM is Canadian doesn't help in this regard.
Also, the problem is not necessarily security of of information stored on the phone itself, but the fact that cell phones and in fact any sort of RF transmitter that isn't specifically approved for use in a classified environment will be banned in many government areas. I'm fairly certain the Oval Office (and likely a number of other sensitive locations in the White House) are such locations.
So, the bulk of your complaint is, "If my laptop is lost, someone will know my identity."
Dude - if your laptop gets stolen and the thief gets busted by the police, wouldn't you WANT identifying information on your laptop? People actually PAY to have identifying information hidden in their laptop for the purposes of theft recovery.
Most portable devices allow the owner to enter identifying information into the device - "Andy's iPod" for the purposes of recovery if a lost item is recovered by someone honest. (Actually not sure about iPods specifically, but every PDA I've owned supports this.)
As someone else commented - not even Gentoo is that fiddly. On Ubuntu I just click on a network, enter the passphrase, and boom I'm connected, it even remembers passphrases for multiple networks. Gentoo is a bit more difficult but Gentoo is for hardcore nutcases like myself. :)
For one: If your router didn't have wireless enabled to begin with, that's not the fault of Linux. You would have had to do the same with a Windows machine.
As to the cracker - what you linked to is a brute force dictionary attack program that just tries one passphrase after another until it finds one that works. Choose a better passphrase that doesn't contain real words so the cracker can't make an "educated" guess. WEP was cracked wide open, the first iteration of WPA has some degree of vulnerability (due to some features to enable WEP backwards compatibility), to my knowledge the only attack against WPA2 is to brute force it.
As to multiple networks showing up in NetworkManager, that's because everyone and their mother has a wireless router now. Unfortunately this means that there are a lot of channel conflicts, including the worse case scenario of people who chose channels not on 1, 6, or 11 (the three nonoverlapping 2.4 GHz channels - any other channel will overlap *two* of the above in a manner which makes the channel access mechanisms far less efficient.) Again, not a Linux problem but a general wifi one.
$199! How can they possibly claim "for the masses" at that price point.
I'm fairly certain it does not cost THAT much extra to make 60Hz shutter glasses (as compared to the 30Hz ones that were not even remotely close to $199, at most they typically resulted in a $20-30 price premium for the cards they were bundled with 8-10 years ago like some of the original Asus GeForce 256 cards.)
Not only that but you need a high-end 120Hz monitor. I know even the old 30Hz glasses stopped working with most LCDs back in the day when LCDs started becoming popular (which was a contributing factor to the old shutter glasses dying off.)
At least older generations of these glasses (as others have said, lower refresh rate versions were available with even the original GeForce, many were bundled by Asus) fit just fine over glasses.
Disclaimer: I work in an industry where we DO worry about people taking drives to the clean room...
The problem is that modern hard drives do automatic defect mapping. The end result is that sometimes important data can be written to a sector, and then the drive will decide that sector is unreliable and map it out. That sector can no longer be accessed in any way. As a result you have a sector which contains data but cannot be wiped because the drive won't let you write there.
Flash memory is even worse since it does write balancing between all cells to PREVENT a failure of a sector, rather than deciding a sector is on its way out and mapping around it then.
Linksys may be crappy, but at least you can install a community-supported variant of Linux on many of their router models.
Netgear is, in my experience, even crappier (as evidenced by how flaky my WPN824 was), and there are very few choices as far as open source alternative firmwares for Netgear routers. They marketed an "open source" router for a while, but I could not find a single instance of third party firmware for that router.
Sadly, Buffalo Technology refused to give into patent trolls and so their wireless products cannoy be purchased in the United States - they have some very solid hardware that makes an excellent host for DD-WRT or Tomato. In fact, I believe they have partnered with DD-WRT to improve the capabilities of DD-WRT on their firmware. My WHR-G54S rocks.
Unfortunately, so far I have only been able to find commercial software for Windows that will do this. Replay Media Catcher will save Hulu and CBS FLVs, and there is one other commercial package that will do it.
It looks like some of the open source downloader packages are adding RTMP support, so I have a feeling an OSS solution is coming soon.
Many news articles about Netflix moving to Silverlight were titled, with "Mac and Linux" in the article title, but at that point (and still), the Silverlight version of the Watch Instantly service supports only Windows and MacOS, not Linux. Linux support was planned but no news on that yet - in theory Monolight provides Silverlight support under Linux but I wouldn't be surprised if the DRM component were missing.
Interestingly enough the Flash-based system used by CBS and Hulu has no DRM (other than some rudimentary anti-ripping features) but the studios still seem to be OK. As a result they work in Linux... Sort of. Flash under Linux has insanely high system requirements for video playback. My old desktop (which is now my HTPC) can't playback directly via the site (incredibly choppy), but if I rip the video on another machine (as I said, rudimentary anti-rip), it plays back happily in mplayer on the aforementioned Athlon XP 2800 machine.
Ripping is a pain in the butt, I wish I could just playback directly on that machine. Hulu's commercials are minimally intrusive.
"or the US could escape most of the cuts while the rest of the world gets layoffs"
If you read TFA, it implies that the cuts are expected to be heaviest overseas.
It's a short article from a noname news source with little to no statistical data to back it up.
I am an AT&T customer and they just did a major 3G rollout in my area (Binghamton, NY area extending all the way to Owego). My girlfriend just bought a 2G-only phone from them and has had no degradation in service (in fact she's ecstatic with the service quality compared to T-Mobile - T-Mo tells customers they can roam on AT&T where T-Mo doesn't have coverage but that capability breaks for weeks at a time, my girlfriend routinely had no service whatsoever for 90% of her commute, including anywhere near work.).
The only service degradation I have noticed is that unless forced to 2G-only, 3G-capable phones will prefer a 3G tower even if it's only one bar of signal and barely useable and the 2G tower provides full signal strength - My apartment and workplace are at the very border of the 3G area.
I do. It reduces medical insurance costs for everyone in the long run, gains the state money, and is easy enough to avoid - just drink diet.
Of course, I'm diabetic so I've been drinking diet soda only for over a decade.
Also, keep in mind that as an engineering project, the final thing that REALLY matters is:
Does it work and perform the function it was designed to do?
I didn't take 576, but I did take 476 from Land. I still consider it the best class I've ever taken in school, undergraduate or graduate.
Have you read TFA yet?
I'm still going through the report, but it criticizes one of Bush's initiatives (CNCI) as having its effectiveness reduced by unnecessary secrecy.
The one thing I don't like about the report is that in general, I consider the word "cyberspace" to be too buzzwordy for some of the ways the report uses, especially the "National Office for Cyberspace"... Maybe something like "National Office for Information Technology Security" or something like that?
"Something kept t2 gear from becoming dirt cheap."
The limiting factor on T2 gear prices quickly became the values of datacores required for invention. Even if the production materials were 100% free, T2 items would have been expensive due to the value of blueprints per production run.
FAVORITE OS? WHAT ARE YOU ON AND WHERE CAN I FIND SOME?
I routinely deal with VxWorks 5.x at work, and it's a nightmarish POS, especially its networking support. I'm assuming Linksys must be using 6.x or a HIGHLY customized 5.x variant with an alternative network stack for their product line, given that the standard 5.x network stack is a halfassed port the 1990 4.4BSD "Reno" release with no new features and a LOT of new bugs.
1) Demonstrating unity gain (not switching) at 26 GHz is nothing.
2) AI will likely require an approach similar to actual biological brains - massively parallel at a low clock speed.
As the article said, this is nowhere near the limit for RF transistors.
Another person pasted some of the abstract of the actual paper, and despite the article containing the words "clocked at", all that was demonstrated was unity gain (i.e. gain cutoff) at 26 GHz for an RF signal, NOT remotely close to digital switching at 26 GHz.
RF test equipment that goes to 40-50 GHz is common (albeit expensive), and specialty test equipment even higher.
See, for example:
http://www.home.agilent.com/agilent/product.jspx?nid=-536902959.0.00&cc=US&lc=eng
http://www.home.agilent.com/agilent/product.jspx?nid=-34374.761699.00&cc=US&lc=eng
Also, even if switching had been demonstrated at a given frequency, that doesn't mean a CPU at that frequency is going to happen. Even with aggressive pipelining, the propagation delay through a digital circuit will be at least 3-4 propagation delays of a single transistor or gate. As we saw with the move from the P4 to the Core 2 series, aggressive pipelining for high clock speed doesn't always work for CPUs due to the IPC penalty a long pipeline has.
I probably should have read TFA, but your excerpt from it says to me that it is indeed only signal amplification and not switching that was observed at 26 GHz.