Bandwidth is "a finite resource", but it's only scarce when it is congested. Yet many ISPs run the meter the same during uncongested periods, such as early mornings local time, as during congested periods.
Look at cell phone plans. The real question is if there is collusion in the industry
If there were collusion, MVNOs and T-Mobile USA have done a decent job of breaking it up. Because MVNOs lease airtime from the top tier carriers, these carriers have to compete for the MVNOs' business, and then the MVNOs compete to offer service to subscribers. T-Mobile's "un-carrier" marketing has made phone subsidies in the US more honest as well.
Once cell towers or satellite transponders in an area get congested, putting up new towers or new birds to allow acceptable rates for a larger number of active users during peak time is decidedly not dirt cheap. And it appears cellular customers aren't quite as receptive to discounts for shifting usage to off-peak times as satellite customers are.
If you have a billion possible user IDs, but only a thousand correspond to users with commenting privileges and only ten correspond to accounts with anything near administrator-level access, an automated online process will have a heck of a time getting through whatever throttling you've already put in place.
USA has CAM as well, called CableCARD. It's just that renting a CAM costs almost as much as renting a cable box in many markets. Compare to phones: a lot of carriers charge you just for having an active SIM even if you don't use any voice minutes, SMS messages, or data. (Source: ting.com)
Scripted shows of any significance are available PPV on various streaming services.
How much does PPV cost for a few series compared to cable? And is it available the same night as cable, or does one have to avoid water cooler spoilers the next morning?
In a free market, the solution is to take your business elsewhere. But here, local governments have contributed to the creation of a monopoly. When the city owns its roads and fails to efficiently manage and price rights of way, you have a government problem that the government is responsible for solving. Ideally, a city would bury generic conduits every time it resurfaces the roads and lease them to competing utilities, which can pull lines through those conduits as needed.
I can't help with the spoilers of scripted series or the Food Network. But for news, you could follow sources on the web, such as breaking news microblogs on Twitter. For gridiron football, you could visit a bar or a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant.
I like British shows well enough, but what are you expecting them to do?
I expect the BBC, through its BBC Worldwide subsidiary, to set up an international subscription service analogous to iPlayer that shows any programme whose exclusive rights in a given country have not yet already been sold.
WP needs a builtin feature that lets us change the wp-login an wp-admin paths so that bots can't just randomly attack our sites.
Admin I can understand. But if a WP site has a comment section, wouldn't members of the public need to hit the login page in order to list past comments that they have posted?
Then we've found the real WTF: sequential assignment of user IDs. Instead of relying on MySQL AUTO_INCREMENT, it should be using random_int(0, 999999999) or the like.
On a system like WordPress, you always tell the user "yep, I just created that account" during user registration but you use the email address already on file for the existing to send an alert to the first registered user saying "hey, someone just tried to recreate your account - was that you"?
Consider the following cases:
Someone signs up for a comment account with the username staisy and the e-mail address staisy2p@example.com. This results in the creation of an account.
Someone else signs up for a comment account with the username staisy and the e-mail address ltd@attacker.com. This results in no account being created.
Someone directs 200 people on some image board to sign up for a comment account with the username staisy and different e-mail addresses.
In each case, what should be displayed, and what mail should be sent? In the second case, sending mail only to Staisy and not to the attacker would indicate to the attacker that the name staisy is in use. And in the third case, sending mail only to Staisy and not to the image board members would flood her inbox.
Or would it be a better idea to shun usernames entirely, instead relying on the e-mail address as the sole primary key to uniquely identify an author of an article or comment? As far as I can tell, that would imply displaying that e-mail address to the world, including spambots that scrape web sites.
Most WordPress systems I've seen don't use comments
If that's true, that might be what I'm missing. I tend to associate the WordPress brand with blogs that have comment sections.
What is the actual risk from user enumeration, especially on a site not about a medical condition?
And how can it be prevented? Do you really want to allow two users to have the same username? If a user sends a private message to a nonexistent user, what error message strikes the best balance between security and usability?
And I imagine the vast majority of Linux devices out there (e.g. Android, and embedded devices) don't run most of the GNU software at all.
FSF agrees that the term "GNU/Linux" is inappropriate for Android and embedded operating environments incorporating the kernel Linux. But "GNU/Linux" is still shorter than "Linux/that/isn't/Android/or/embedded".
Then perhaps AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle need to sit down and negotiate what constitutes a core for the purpose of licensing proprietary software.
I'd rather have a faster processor that generates less heat and runs longer because it can do the work much more quickly and therefore needs less on time.
True, the backlight often draws more power than the CPU nowadays. And if a program takes longer to run on the CPU, it keeps the backlight on longer. But if it's blocked on user input the vast majority of the time, then the backlight runs either way. If I'm typing a Slashdot comment into a text area in Firefox, even a five-year-old Atom N450 can more than keep up.
Also SpeedStep eliminates any benefit of a slow CPU.
Is SpeedStep on Pentium or Core i good enough to scale down to Atom-class power consumption nowadays?
If slow processors get the work done fast enough, and they allow the device to be smaller, generate less heat, and run longer on a given mass of battery, then I'll take the slow processors.
How do "Publishers filter out bad writers" better than Internet reviews do? Three decades ago, the entry barrier associated with the Official Nintendo Seal made sense for a video game industry struggling to recover after the 1983 crash. But in 2015, we have a decentralized review scene on the Internet to help game buyers avoid crap.
ISPs being unwilling to protect their subscribers from denial of service attacks is an entirely different problem from the "ads and [...] autoplay videos" that riverat1 mentioned.
I don't mind the creation of walled gardens up to a point. The death of AOL taught us that people will migrate to free networks when they're available.
Not always, as people who play video games still tend to buy consoles more often than building a gaming PC for the living room. And as far as I can tell, they buy a Nintendo 3DS rather than a MOGA clip-on gamepad for an existing Android phone. What makes walled gardens so much more acceptable for games than otherwise?
Slashdot Mirror
What do apps manipulate?
(Other than the user's psychology, that is.)
Bandwidth is "a finite resource", but it's only scarce when it is congested. Yet many ISPs run the meter the same during uncongested periods, such as early mornings local time, as during congested periods.
Look at cell phone plans. The real question is if there is collusion in the industry
If there were collusion, MVNOs and T-Mobile USA have done a decent job of breaking it up. Because MVNOs lease airtime from the top tier carriers, these carriers have to compete for the MVNOs' business, and then the MVNOs compete to offer service to subscribers. T-Mobile's "un-carrier" marketing has made phone subsidies in the US more honest as well.
data transfer is dirt cheap (penies per gb)
Once cell towers or satellite transponders in an area get congested, putting up new towers or new birds to allow acceptable rates for a larger number of active users during peak time is decidedly not dirt cheap. And it appears cellular customers aren't quite as receptive to discounts for shifting usage to off-peak times as satellite customers are.
If you have a billion possible user IDs, but only a thousand correspond to users with commenting privileges and only ten correspond to accounts with anything near administrator-level access, an automated online process will have a heck of a time getting through whatever throttling you've already put in place.
USA has CAM as well, called CableCARD. It's just that renting a CAM costs almost as much as renting a cable box in many markets. Compare to phones: a lot of carriers charge you just for having an active SIM even if you don't use any voice minutes, SMS messages, or data. (Source: ting.com)
Scripted shows of any significance are available PPV on various streaming services.
How much does PPV cost for a few series compared to cable? And is it available the same night as cable, or does one have to avoid water cooler spoilers the next morning?
In six month's time I will ask everyone in the family (four of us) to give me a good reason why we need to keep the cable service.
In four months, NCAA division 1 men's basketball playoffs. In six months, NHL and NBA playoffs.
In a free market, the solution is to take your business elsewhere. But here, local governments have contributed to the creation of a monopoly. When the city owns its roads and fails to efficiently manage and price rights of way, you have a government problem that the government is responsible for solving. Ideally, a city would bury generic conduits every time it resurfaces the roads and lease them to competing utilities, which can pull lines through those conduits as needed.
I can't help with the spoilers of scripted series or the Food Network. But for news, you could follow sources on the web, such as breaking news microblogs on Twitter. For gridiron football, you could visit a bar or a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant.
I like British shows well enough, but what are you expecting them to do?
I expect the BBC, through its BBC Worldwide subsidiary, to set up an international subscription service analogous to iPlayer that shows any programme whose exclusive rights in a given country have not yet already been sold.
The only thing that keeps them alive is lack of broadband to some viewers.
That and the long-term exclusive contracts among sport leagues, pay television networks, and multichannel pay television system operators.
Apple has a patent on universal search
Then perhaps someone else can get the patent on columbia, disney, fox, paramount, and warner search.
WP needs a builtin feature that lets us change the wp-login an wp-admin paths so that bots can't just randomly attack our sites.
Admin I can understand. But if a WP site has a comment section, wouldn't members of the public need to hit the login page in order to list past comments that they have posted?
give me user #1
Then we've found the real WTF: sequential assignment of user IDs. Instead of relying on MySQL AUTO_INCREMENT, it should be using random_int(0, 999999999) or the like.
On a system like WordPress, you always tell the user "yep, I just created that account" during user registration but you use the email address already on file for the existing to send an alert to the first registered user saying "hey, someone just tried to recreate your account - was that you"?
Consider the following cases:
In each case, what should be displayed, and what mail should be sent? In the second case, sending mail only to Staisy and not to the attacker would indicate to the attacker that the name staisy is in use. And in the third case, sending mail only to Staisy and not to the image board members would flood her inbox.
Or would it be a better idea to shun usernames entirely, instead relying on the e-mail address as the sole primary key to uniquely identify an author of an article or comment? As far as I can tell, that would imply displaying that e-mail address to the world, including spambots that scrape web sites.
Most WordPress systems I've seen don't use comments
If that's true, that might be what I'm missing. I tend to associate the WordPress brand with blogs that have comment sections.
What is the actual risk from user enumeration, especially on a site not about a medical condition?
And how can it be prevented? Do you really want to allow two users to have the same username? If a user sends a private message to a nonexistent user, what error message strikes the best balance between security and usability?
And I imagine the vast majority of Linux devices out there (e.g. Android, and embedded devices) don't run most of the GNU software at all.
FSF agrees that the term "GNU/Linux" is inappropriate for Android and embedded operating environments incorporating the kernel Linux. But "GNU/Linux" is still shorter than "Linux/that/isn't/Android/or/embedded".
Then perhaps AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle need to sit down and negotiate what constitutes a core for the purpose of licensing proprietary software.
I'd rather have a faster processor that generates less heat and runs longer because it can do the work much more quickly and therefore needs less on time.
True, the backlight often draws more power than the CPU nowadays. And if a program takes longer to run on the CPU, it keeps the backlight on longer. But if it's blocked on user input the vast majority of the time, then the backlight runs either way. If I'm typing a Slashdot comment into a text area in Firefox, even a five-year-old Atom N450 can more than keep up.
Also SpeedStep eliminates any benefit of a slow CPU.
Is SpeedStep on Pentium or Core i good enough to scale down to Atom-class power consumption nowadays?
Where was AMD dishonest that a Bulldozer contains four modules?
If slow processors get the work done fast enough, and they allow the device to be smaller, generate less heat, and run longer on a given mass of battery, then I'll take the slow processors.
How do "Publishers filter out bad writers" better than Internet reviews do? Three decades ago, the entry barrier associated with the Official Nintendo Seal made sense for a video game industry struggling to recover after the 1983 crash. But in 2015, we have a decentralized review scene on the Internet to help game buyers avoid crap.
ISPs being unwilling to protect their subscribers from denial of service attacks is an entirely different problem from the "ads and [...] autoplay videos" that riverat1 mentioned.
from the still-waiting-on-the-xbox-dreamcast dept.
That exists. Xbox was contracted from "DirectX box". A few dozen Dreamcast games were made with Windows CE, which included DirectX.
I don't mind the creation of walled gardens up to a point. The death of AOL taught us that people will migrate to free networks when they're available.
Not always, as people who play video games still tend to buy consoles more often than building a gaming PC for the living room. And as far as I can tell, they buy a Nintendo 3DS rather than a MOGA clip-on gamepad for an existing Android phone. What makes walled gardens so much more acceptable for games than otherwise?