> What happened to those ultra cheap ARM laptops we were hearing about awhile back, that is what I want to know
Consumers and manufacturers figured out that 7" screens aren't fun to look at, and a sub-GHz ARM won't do streaming video unless you add a coprocessor that bumps the cost up to what you'd spend on an Atom, anyway.
In the US, at least, the Netbook market seems to have found its happy niche for the next year or two: notebooks with 10" screens (small enough to save some cash, but big enough to use comfortably), long battery life (5-6 hours with minimal power management), and more or less the bulk and heft of the original Compaq Contura Aero from the early 90s... the width and depth of an ultraportable, but an inch thick instead of 1/4" thick, and ~3-4 lbs weight. Small enough to comfortably use on an airplane, light enough to fade into the background noise of your consciousness, and cheap enough ($400-500) to skim off the buyers who'd have otherwise bought the loss-leader notebook of the week at Best Buy or OfficeMax.
Part of the reason for the "Aero" metaphor is because I *had* one back in college, and had a major love-hate relationship with it. I loved the fact that it was (for its day) relatively small and light, had great battery life, and could be used just about anywhere with minimal ceremony. HOWEVER... its 7.5" screen was too small, period, and was what ultimately forced me to ditch it for a DEC HiNote Ultra CT475. I always wished someone would make a relatively affordable notebook with a similar form factor to the Aero, but a bigger screen (the Aero had a HUGE bezel) and modern cpu/memory/storage specs. The day arrived about a year ago, and I have a MSI U100 (expanded to 2 gigs) that runs Vista Ultimate like a champ, handles Netbeans, Office 2007, and Visual Studio 2k8 with minimal drama, and plays 720p and 1080i MPEG-2/h.264 video like a champ.
My only complaint? The keyboard. Specifically, the fact that MSI decided to mash the cursor-Tee into the lower-right corner of a straight rectangle to save a few cents instead of letting the cursor keys dangle on a peninsula below the main part of the keyboard, and did it by making the,./ keys 2/3 the size of the others. The keyboard is already on the "tight" side, and those three keys endlessly drive me crazy. It's the only reason why I DON'T enthusiastically recommend it to others. If they ditch the mashed keyboard on a future model and keep everything else more or less the same, I'll give it 9/10 as a travel computer.
Speaking of uses... lately, I've discovered that it actually makes a shockingly decent -- if unconventional -- ebook reader for Manning/O'Reilly-sized pdf books if you turn it sideways (so the screen is portrait on the right, and the keyboard is on the left) like an open hardcover book (hinge = book spine). 1024 x 600 is *just* big enough to do a decent job of rendering the page if you run acrobat reader full-screen. It's a shame there aren't a few buttons flanking the webcam that can be read as if they were keys on the keyboard... I could definitely think of some good ways to put them to use for an ebook reader:-)
> It means 20 years of waiting for the patent to expire before this kind of interface can be advanced at all.
No, it means Google Android will be the only viable alternative to an iPhone -- in America, at least. Apple can stop HTC from cloning their UI, and they can stop American cell companies from distributing Android phones with an infringing UI pre-installed, but they can't do a damn thing to stop American Android users from downloading code to do it anyway from a server in Bulgaria, Vanatu, Russia, or anywhere else not subject to the long arm of American patent law.
Ditto, for allegedly-infringing open-source extensions for WinMo. Apple wants to sue someone who makes a free shell extension to let HTC phones look like an iPhone? Great... they're awarded 100% of the money he's ever made by selling his infringing product. Oh, wait a minute...
Let's not forget another SEC clusterf**k that causes endless grief to cash (non-margin) investors (especially newbies)... the "1+3 rule".
When you buy shares of stock, the funds are gone from your trading account the instant your order gets fulfilled. But as far as the SEC is concerned, you haven't actually "paid" for the shares until the close of the day's trading, and don't actually OWN the shares until the third business day after the trade.
Why is that a problem? Because the SEC ALSO prohibits cash traders from selling shares they haven't paid for yet... and classifies the act of selling shares you haven't paid for as "free riding", immoral, and deserving of punishment. Since you won't have technically "funded" your purchase until the close of the current day's trading (even though the funds were most certainly taken from your account the moment the purchase was made), it's officially verboten for someone with a cash account to buy shares, then sell the same shares later in the day. Likewise, you're allowed to sell shares of stock, and immediately use the proceeds to buy shares of a second company... but if you do, you're officially prohibited from selling THOSE shares until three days later, and once again subject to nasty punishments if you do.
Nevermind the fact that the funds are committed, seized from your account, beyond your control, and there's absolutely no risk whatsoever that payment won't be made. Or the fact that someone with a margin account funded with at least $25,000 can freely buy shares, sell them 100 milliseconds later, and do it a few more times if they feel like it. Or the fact that someone trading "naked shorts" can sell shares THEY DON'T EVEN FUCKING OWN, with the understanding that they'll buy them from someone else before the end of the day. The fact that your cash is being held in limbo by the broker until the end of the day's trading when you dared to sell the shares you bought earlier in the day to some other person makes you an evil scoundrel somehow trying to cheat the system, reap unjust rewards, and deserving of nasty, draconian punishment.
Sort of. Java is free if the end user downloads it directly from Sun and install it himself. If you want to distribute Java along with your own Java-based application in a way that seamlessly installs or updates the JVM if the end user doesn't already have it, you have to pay licensing fees to Sun. Very, very EXPENSIVE licensing fees.
Now... for Slashdot users, yes... Java is free like beer. Downloading and installing it is no big deal, if it hasn't already been done long ago. For J6P and his PHB, it's nontrivial. It's actually a brilliant strategy by Sun. They set the bar for getting it "free" SO LOW that anyone with half a brain and even the most trivial bit of computer knowledge can do it... but as we all know, there are plenty of people for whom that's literally an insurmountable barrier. It also means you can't distribute turnkey solutions based on Java without paying licensing fees. Sun makes quite a bit of money from licensees who developed apps all the way to the point where they were ready to sell, only to discover at the last moment that Java isn't quite as "free" as they thought it was.
Ditto, for MySQL. As long as the end user personally downloads and installs it, it's free. The moment it ends up integrated into your installer, or ships already installed, you have to pay.
Of course, distributing your OWN application as open-source might be enough of a loophole to distribute it together with Java and/or MySQL (or at least an installer that automates its download from Sun and subsequent installation), but once again, it's a surprisingly effective requirement that filters out most real-world commercial scenarios. You can either distribute your application under the GPL, or pay immense licensing fees to Sun.
Personally, I think Sun's management is insane to even THINK about laying off that many employees just to appease the angry gods of Wall Street. And I own lots of largely symbolic stock in Sun that's worth about as much as a pallet of Charmin from Sam's Club, so I *have* paid dearly for the right to hold that view. Wall Street doesn't understand that with a company like Sun, their human capital IS a major portion of the company's real worth and value. When those employees walk out the door after being RIF'ed, millions of dollars worth of Sun's most valuable assets will be going up in smoke. I don't think I'm the only one to hold that view. IMHO, half the reason Sun's stock was so badly punished on Friday, contrary to the predictions of most Wall Street analysts, was because the people who really UNDERSTAND companies like Sun took the news the same way someone would take news about a company intentionally and systematically undertaking the destruction of a major part of its capital assets. Frankly, I'd be happier to see Sun's stock fall below a buck, be delisted, and be pink-sheeted for a few years while R&D continues unimpeded, before Sun gets relisted as a more valuable company, than to see its stock price get jacked back up a whopping 50c or so for a few days amidst Wall Street's jubilation over layoffs... before crashing back down to what it would have been anyway without the layoffs and wanton destruction of Sun's real value.
It's almost enough to make me want to encourage people to buy or sell enough Sun stock to end up with some nice binary number of shares (16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc) as a way of visibly demonstrating support for Sun's long-term R&D over Wall Street's obsession with quarterly profits. Right now, Sun stock is so cheap, you could almost buy 16 shares for $75 including the brokerage commission... but then again, reading about Sun's apparent internal bureaucracy makes me equally want to just say f**k it, dump my shares for $4.60, and walk away.
I used to LOVE Experts Exchange back in 2000, but lost interest in them when they made it nearly impossible to make meaningful use of the site without paying REGARDLESS of how many expert points you'd racked up over the years, or how many "best answers" you'd earned. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend hours of my time building value for them only to be subjected to petty annoyances when I finally need to have one of my OWN questions answered. The fact is, I'd say a majority of the useful answers there are (or at least WERE) contributed by a fairly small core group of users... a group they totally alienated and drove away by their refusal to let that small group "earn its keep" and earn enough points to usefully use the site through barter alone so they could bring in the BULK of the users who just wanted to pay and get their questions answered.
> I dare say that a 1Ghz PC with XP (or even better GNU/Linux) would suffice as a workstation for 80% of office workers.
Ummm... 1GHz pushing it a little far. Let's say 1.6GHz with 2 gigs of RAM;-)
Anything less than that, and you're going to end up endlessly consuming your support staff's time, because slow computers almost inevitably have problems that fast ones don't. Yeah, it's probably due to user error (filling the input queue with superfluous mouseclicks when Windows appears to be unresponsive because it's madly thrashing something to and from the pagefile, hitting ctrl-alt-delete to kill an app at the worst possible moment, or similar feats)... but it happens. Unless your employees' time has zero value (including the time of your support staff), making them use slow computers is false economy of the worst kind.
Also, there's nothing magic about Linux's resource requirements. A 1GHz PC running KDE or Gnome is going to be every bit as slow and overloaded as a 1GHz PC running Windows XP... if not worse. Launch Open Office's word processor, Thunderbird, and one or two instances of Firefox, and it's going to be brought to its knees every bit as hard as the XP box running the exact same apps.
If nothing else, the fact that Linux is nominally free means there's no excuse for sabotaging your business with underpowered hardware, because you can use the $100-200 savings from Linux to give it double the ram, a 7200rpm hard drive, and a dual-core CPU...
> 2 story/2 people house and you're paying $100/month for power?
Try $360-420/month for a 2 story/2 bedroom townhouse in South Florida, where even grudgingly turned up to 75 degrees, the central a/c is cycled on for at least 18-20 hours/day. According to the thermostat's log, there were days when it was "on" for all but 20-60 minutes over the span of 24 hours. On a few of those days, it was SO HOT outside (96 degrees wet-bulb or higher), the temperature inside crept up to 76 degrees for 2-3 hours despite the air conditioner's most valiant efforts.
> In this case, they are admitting that it is due to the global credit crunch, which I am pretty > sure is not the CEOs fault, and yet they are firing him anyway.
That's because the most important job of CEO is NOT "running the company", but rather finding capital for the company's operation and growth. When a company needs a $50 million loan, its CEO doesn't walk down to the local bank branch and fill out an application... its CEO has to use his/her social connections to FIND people and institutions capable of lending or investing the money, and CONVINCE them to actually DO it. That's a big part of the reason why (many) CEOs make so much money -- they've proven that they have the ability to raise lots of cash, which is incredibly valuable to the companies that hire them.
In this case, it appears that the old CEO wasn't able to do that critical task well enough, so he was replaced.
IMHO, Tesla is in no danger of going completely belly-up... at least, not until it's lasted long enough to at least build one for Woz. I think it's safe to say that lately he's been going to bed at night dreaming of the one that will eventually take the place of his Prius;-)
And how, exactly, will this make the slightest difference to someone who buys a domain name, hosts it on a server in another country, and locates the SMTP/POP3/IMAP4 services on nonstandard ports -- encrypted or not? Are they really planning to do deep packet inspection on every byte that flows through a government-monitored router in the UK? Or are they really just clueless enough to believe that everyone in the UK gets their email via their local, government-compliant ISP?
This isn't a rhetorical question... if the real goal is to fight groups like Al-Qaeda, this law will do absolutely NOTHING, because Al-Quaeda *specifically* happens to be run by individuals who seem to be quite a bit more technologically savvy than most members of the British Parliament and US Congress/Senate. If the "host the server elsewhere, on a nonstandard port, and encrypt it if necessary via SSL and/or PGP" solution occurred to me in ~3 seconds while eating breakfast and still slightly groggy after getting up, I suspect "the bad guys" would figure it out almost as quickly;-)
On the other hand, if terrorism is just an excuse (like it's become in the US), and the real goal is to use it to let law enforcement personnel use email sniffing to fight far more mundane crimes ("d00d, what's your dealer's phone #, and how much is he charging for a dime bag this week?") committed by unsophisticated peons in this week's ${WarOnEverything}, well... it might have a shot.
> Something tells me that an American collection agency is going to have a hard time collecting a foreign debt (with interest!) > from a Pakistani who goes home to Islamabad. Americans don't have a lot of credit there, pun intended, if you know what I mean.
Maybe... but they'd have no difficulty at all ruthlessly hounding down an engineer who moved back to London, Sydney, Trondheim (Norway), Munich, or even Brasilia, Buenos Aires, or Santiago. Remember, we're not talking about sweatshop factory workers... we're talking about people who are among the best & brightest in their industry, with American companies bidding against companies in other countries to attract them as employees.
The biggest problem with American immigration law is its schizophrenic goal of reuniting families (dropping any and all standards for extended family members once the first member is approved) while hating immigrants in general (partly due to the results of the all-encompassing family-reunion goal). This is a real business problem, because it does hurt the ability of American firms to recruit and hire the world's best and brightest. Increasingly, we've HAD candidates (especially from Britain and Scandinavia) tell us point blank that we couldn't pay them enough to move to the US. Period, full-stop, end of story. Canada, sure. But America? As far as they're concerned, we've turned into a mean, paranoid police state that automatically treats foreigners like criminals. Accurate or not, that's increasingly the perception held by foreign professionals about life in America, and it's definitely hurting our competitiveness against companies in countries like Canada that are willing to roll out the red carpet and treat them like welcome, valued guests.
> The majority of the H-1B's that I've worked with have been bright, intelligent, and > talented individuals with skillsets not easily available in my market (Midwest).
Ditto. At my company (major telco), my H-1B coworkers make just as much as we (the Americans) do (taking into account the increased administrative costs, probably 10% MORE).
The article is a bit sensationalistic, lumping just about anything that's the slightest violation of the rules into the "fraud" category. Truth be told, some of the rules (like forcing employees to leave the country immediately within 10 days of termination) would make it absolutely impossible to recruit viable employees if they were rigidly enforced. Think about it... someone who makes $80-100k is going to have a nice apartment (or buy a house), and drive a nice car with expensive payments. If their job gets eliminated, the lease/mortgage on their apt/condo/house and loan on their car isn't going to just go away, and if they TRIED to just walk away from them, you can bet the creditors would do their best to follow them "home". It's completely unrealistic to expect a highly-paid professional to take a job almost guaranteed to leave them financially destroyed if they were laid off. At least, the kind of employees WORTH hiring under H-1B.
People who think those rules are reasonable should ask themselves... as an American, how much money would an employer somewhere like Sweden, Dubai, France, South Africa, or Australia have to offer YOU to take a job there, with the caveat that you could be laid off at any time, with no benefits, no compensation for the cost of moving your stuff back to the US, and laws that simultaneously require you to leave the country immediately if terminated, yet remain fully liable for any and all costs arising from broken leases, defaulted mortgages or car loans, or anything else of that nature? Most H-1B employees at my company aren't starving, desperate people from third-world countries grateful for any job at all.... they're people who are the cream of the crop, who'd get paid a shitload of cash in their own countries and have to be offered even more to put up with the crap our government subjects them to. The way INS treats them, it's a miracle we can get them to come work for us at all. I know *I'd* tell any government that tried to treat me as badly as ours treats non-American professionals to go fuck itself and die.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again in the hope that someone from Microsoft might actually see this and have it sink in...
If a program wants to create a new directory in c:\program files, that's not really a big deal.
If a program wants to overwrite an existing non-executable file in an EXISTING directory of c:\program files, it's probably worth bothering me about.
If a program wants to overwrite an existing executable file, dll, or device driver... or change a shortcut to point to a different file... THAT is a very, VERY big deal that merits my full attention.
What Windows 7 REALLY needs is a way to run untrusted programs (untrusted by ME, not untrusted by Hollywood) in a chroot jail, complete with firewalled network access, spoofed system and registry settings, and parallel-universe copies of system files. Basically, a way to run apps that might be outright trojans in a way that limits the scope of their damage to their own subdirectory tree and phantom system files that are meaningful only to that app.
Hell, Microsoft OWNS VirtualPC. DO SOMETHING with it. Give me an option that basically works something like, "Spawn a virgin installation of Windows... updated, but crap-free, with Explorer (the file manager) NOT spawned by default, and windows opening up in windows managed by the "real" hypervising-copy of Windows 7... then copy the installer to that instance's chroot jail, and launch it. Going forward, spawn the virtual instance of Windows, then launch the app in it." Think: the long-awaited sequel to WinOS/2... 15 years late, but better late than never;-)
The acid test: make it so someone can install a DRM'ed game that's a shameless rootkit (Starforce comes to mind...), emulating Windows well enough with phantom files (any files the program changes are local copies that apply only to the session that spawned them) and spoofed drivers so the Evil App never even realizes it's not screwing up the user's PC. Then be very, VERY anal about warning the user before anything is able to change a "global" (common to all instances of Windows spawned under the hypervisor) setting or file. Big hint... if you don't, Sun or VMware eventually WILL.
> Pah. The "average citizen" is busy on bittorrent without a worry about "fair use".
Pah. The "average citizen" is busy on bittorrent^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h YOUTUBE without a worry about "fair use".
There. Fixed it for ya!:)
IMHO, the situation is more like, "An average citizen has no hope of negotiating the legal minefield for any kind of profit, but can use Youtube as an expressive media for personal gratification and let THEIR army of lawyers deal with the licensing arrangements that would otherwise make its creation and distribution impossible."
Aside from the harm created by perpetual copyright, the other big problem with IP law right now is the transaction costs of licensing. Want to make your own Southpark episode starring Beavis & Butthead? Good luck getting the media firms responsible for licensing them to even return your phone call unless Trey Parker, Matt Stone, AND Mike Judge personally intervene on your behalf to cut the red tape. Otherwise, you'll be spending several thousand dollars per hour, plus expenses, on negotiations ultimately leading to boilerplate licensing fees so outrageous, even the lawyers will admit that they're intended more to weed people out than actually open up new business possibilities. To them, you're *so far* below the commercial radar, you're wasting their time. Ergo, Youtube's ultimate business model... leveraging the economies of scale that only a major media conglomerate can afford to hammer out bulk licensing deals for content that's not quite lucrative enough to justify dealing with the parties individually.
> My main worry about these netbooks is video decoding Video decoding is fairly easy... it's ENCODING that really sucks down the CPU cycles. Old computers didn't have problems decoding video in realtime because they were too slow... they choked because they didn't have enough RAM to keep everything related to the video buffered in physical RAM, and keep it there while doing other background tasks. The moment you start getting page faults and swapping things out to hard drive, all bets are off... even with a dual-core CPU.
I just bought a MSI Wind a few days ago (with second SoDIMM for 2 gigs total). It's surprisingly fast, even for things like Netbeans and Visual Studio. The key? Lots and lots of RAM. Avoid swapping, and everything else falls into place... even with a "slow" CPU. A Vista/XP/Linux-with-Compiz notebook with 2 gigs, 5400RPM hard drive, and a 500MHz Pentium III will probably provide better real-world performance than a "modern" budget notebook with 512mb, ~2GHz Celeron M, and 4200RPM hard drive because the "faster" new one will run out of RAM almost immediately and be shackled to its slow hard drive, while the "slower" old one will chug along nicely because it doesn't have to keep violently lurching back and forth as it swaps things between physical ram and the hard drive.
Personally, I think there's only one thing that can really make all-electric cars & trucks viable for long-distance travel... some kind of side-mounted power rail accessible to cars driving in the leftmost lane on interstate highways that gas-fueled cars can ignore, but electric cars can dynamically draw power from for long-distance travel (falling back on their battery when changing lanes, passing, not following a left exit, etc). Of course, there'd need to be some standardized means of metering and billing drivers for electricity actually used, and IMHO the most viable place to put the rail is probably in a cut immediately to the left of the leftmost lane, depressed ~2 inches below surface height when the road is resurfaced (so the surrounding road gradually wears down until it's level). There'd be a shock hazard for anyone carelessly walking around... but arguably, someone walking around in the emergency lane on a freeway is at fairly major risk of getting hit by a car at any time, anyway, so it's really not upping the risk that much. Ask any highway patrolman how many instances he's aware of where someone ended up hitting a car stopped in the emergency lane, and that car ended up injuring or killing someone standing nearby...
> There isn't anyone worth $35 million (or whatever it was) for 19 days of work.
Weeeellllll... that's often (if not usually) true, but not *quite* 100%. People tend to forget that the most important job of a large corporation's CEO *ISN'T* running the company... it's finding people willing to lend large sums of money to the company, or buy lots of its stock (not just 100 shares). When a small business needs to buy a new computer, the owner probably puts it on a credit card he personally had to guarantee, or finances it through someone like Dell (also assuming a role as personal guarantor of the debt). Raising the funds to buy two hundred THOUSAND laptops or computers (or company cars, or square feet of floor tile, or just about *anything* for that matter) is several orders of magnitude more challenging. The CEO of McDonald's doesn't just walk into the bank's nearest branch to fill out a credit application for a $50 million loan... he has to personally go out and FIND people willing to invest the cash. Sometimes the role might be delegated to a Wall Street securities firm, but for really HUGE loans, the CEO better be pretty damn good at playing golf, and knowing how to tactfully let the prospective investor he's trying to woo win by a few strokes.
Likewise, everyone likes to criticize "golden parachutes", but they have an important purpose, too. Think about it for a moment. If a company gets bought by another company, it's CEO is almost certainly going to be unemployed (or at least no longer CEO). It's not inconceivable that the best interests of the stockholders (who, through the President, hire the CEO to act in their best interests when managing the company) might collide with the personal best interests of the CEO (who, like anyone else, would probably prefer to remain employed as CEO rather than sign his own employment "death warrant"). During a prospective merger, NOBODY is in a better position to torpedo and sabotage it than the CEO. So... we have golden parachutes, made part of the CEO's employment contract to ensure that he'll walk away from a merger happy and satisfied, and will do everything he can to help facilitate such a merger. It's really not much different from "retention bonuses" offered to IT professionals when their positions are planned for elimination at some point in the future to encourage them to stick around until the end, instead of bolting for a new company at the first opportunity. Do some go overboard? Of course. But it's important to keep in mind that they DO have a purpose, and don't just exist to let wealthy CEOs live lives of luxury.
As for CEO salaries... well... part of THAT is pure public relations. If you have $100 million to invest in a company, you're going to look for evidence that the company is doing well financially. Wal Mart can get away with the "po' country folk" act, because everyone on planet earth knows they're one of the world's most powerful retailers. JustAnother Co, Inc. doesn't quite have that option. Rhetoric aside, few big-time investors are genuinely impressed by threadbare & penny-pinching companies, because those type of companies might chug along for decades, but aren't likely to ever really strike it wildly rich. Big investors aren't interested in them. If they want safe, conservative investments, they'll buy more stock in Verizon, AT&T, Florida Power & Light, or some other utility that's practically a government-guaranteed investment with legislatively-mandated rate of return. The big investors are more interested in companies with a small risk of going broke, and a high chance of becoming wildly successful.
So... getting back to the quote from the parent post... a CEO who does nothing but go to board meetings and leads the company to destruction is clearly not worth $35 million for ANY length of time. On the other hand, a CEO who uses those 19 days to raise $250 million in needed capital for the company by taking advantage of his personal connections is worth every penny of it, and more. Most of the REALLY egregious
Plus, Facebook has (at least) one fundamental flaw: it assumes you WANT everyone who you're "friends" with to indiscriminately know about everyone ELSE you're "friends" with. It ignores the fact that you don't necessarily WANT your kid brother (or coworkers, or parents) reading about your wild weekend (or at least not the full details you'd share with your best and closest friends).
What's needed is a social networking site with a concept of groups as containers for acquaintances and other groups, applying permissions in the order of default-deny, groups with permission, groups denied, individuals permitted, individuals denied. THEN, when you post something, you'd be able to specify its visibility scope across those groups... possibly, even creating fake or munged entries for some groups to see in lieu of "real" entries, and NO way for acquaintances to discern which group(s) they're in, or even which groups exist at all.
Then, you could create a safe, bland (semi-)public page for (almost) everyone to see, but let the appropriate acquaintances see things appropriate to their relationship with you... and possibly even maintain one or more "parallel universes" that completely override each other for people with two or more groups of friends that should (ideally) NEVER encounter each other (parents and drinking buddies being an obvious example). Ideally, you could even set up one or more "duress" passwords that logged you in as an admin for your profile with access to only a subset of your real one, in case someone like a girlfriend or family member coerced you into logging in with them present to "prove" something. By allowing an unlimited number of duress passwords with unlimited groups and parallel universes, you'd effectively achieve plausible deniability... nobody could ever force you to reveal things, because they could never know for sure whether you were logged in with a duress password or your real one.
The sad thing is, a feature like THIS would be the perfect way to monetize something like Facebook... keeping the current model free, but charging monthly or annual fees to add more sophisticated group management and/or depth.
^^^ note... I know that solar water heating systems != photovoltaic arrays. The point is that big panels of ANY kind on a roof in areas guaranteed to be hit by hurricanes aren't going to last for more than a few years before getting destroyed. Solar water heating was fairly cheap and low-tech, and was wiped out by the threat of hurricane damage. I suspect photovoltaic arrays costing tens or hundreds of dollars apiece (with dozens or hundreds needed to generate any meaningful amount of power) won't exactly fare much better with either hurricanes OR consumers here.;-)
> I for one look forward to the day where my garage has a solar panel on the roof and my full electric car charges > overnight costing me ZERO dollars to "fill up".... as long as you don't live in Florida or somewhere else vulnerable to hurricanes. Solar hot water heaters became VERY popular here during the 80s and early 90s... until Andrew destroyed every single one in Dade County, insurance companies refused to insure them because they're pretty much GUARANTEED to sustain expensive damage in even a mild hurricane, and the sale of new ones pretty much ended... then the parade of hurricanes in 2004 destroyed just about every single solar hot water heating system in the state.
Could they be made hurricane-proof? Unlikely, short of building the roof from concrete, anchoring the panels with steel bands embedded into that concrete, and putting half-inch aquarium-glass or aluminum oxide covers on them (which might affect their performance in addition to making them prohibitively expensive). Could you take them down and stow them inside the house? Well, it depends... how enthusiastic are you about carrying a hundred or more heavy rectangular panels at least the size of a half sheet of drywall down a ladder, one at a time... moving all the furniture in the living room to make room for them, putting down plastic (they're dirty, after all... don't want to ruin the floorcovering), carrying them inside, piling them up... then repeating the whole process, in reverse, after the hurricane? Moving a few panels inside is one thing... moving an entire ROOF's worth of them is another matter entirely.
Unless gas were to become PROHIBITIVELY expensive (as in, $8-10+/gallon) and/or the electricity used to recharge the car came from nuclear power, the likelihood of all-electric travel being cheaper over the car's lifetime in absolute terms than gas-electric hybrids, or even fuel-efficient internal combustion engine cars, is low.
Gas-electric hybrids make a certain amount of sense, because they provide two traction systems that are each optimized for the two most common scenarios encountered by typical American drivers:
* An internal combustion engine for travel at highway (45+ mph speeds). Internal combustion engines are EXCEPTIONALLY efficient when used to move a car 45+ mph, because that's the load they're optimized for. The reason why fuel economy goes down the toilet in congested city traffic is because the engine ends up running almost as hard, and burning almost as much fuel per MINUTE sitting in stop and go traffic as it would driving 45+mph on a freeway during that same minute.
* An electric traction motor for use in stop-and-go congestion. When the car isn't moving, the only load is the air conditioner and 80x4+180-watt (RMS) amp being driven by the car's entertainment system. HOWEVER, electric traction motors powered by gas-fueled generators utterly SUCK compared to internal combustion engines when it comes to total operating costs over long distances at highway speeds. Put another way, if you make an electric car with a battery big enough to go 10-20 miles, a generator for longer-distance travel, and you drive 250 miles at 70mph on an interstate using that generator... it's going to take about twice as much gas, and cost twice as much money, to drive those 250 miles compared to what someone with a car that even PRETENDS to be fuel-efficient. That's why nobody makes hybrid gas-electric cars that rely on a gas-fired generator for their primary power source... if you actually RELIED on that generator to any real degree, you'd end up buying double the gas as someone with a "normal" car.
Toyota has it right. When you cut the crap and throw away the environmentalist ideology, the most cost-effective solution is to build higher-end vehicles with BOTH internal combustion AND electric traction motors (especially things like SUVs that get used mostly in urban stop-and-go traffic), and use whichever one is more efficient for the current driving conditions. At the lowest end (cheap cars for poor people), you're better off sticking with cheap, lightweight, and fuel-efficient internal combustion engines, because someone in THAT market bracket is unlikely to see enough savings in gas costs over the life of the car to offset its higher manufacturing cost. Even if it's "only" $5,000 more. Add the interest expense of piling another $5,000 into the loan amount for 60 months, and any pretense of cost-efficiency goes completely out the window.
> How many emails do you send a day to people you have never communicated with > ( which would be the number of times you would have to retrieve a new hash-acct address from their server) ?
I'd say I might average 3-5 in a typical week. As others have noted, it's a one-time hassle that "just works" for effortless future communication going forward with that individual. Remembering the aliases is no big deal, because I have a few rules I always follow for generating them that inevitably narrows down the list of possibilities to a single obvious one, or maybe 2 or 3 plausible ones. For websites, I generate them in the form 'myaccount-hostnamewithoutdotcomnetetc.validationcode@mydomain.org'. So for something like Amazon, it would be something like 'foo-amazon.d2m@mydomain.org'. For rare occasions where there are two or more sites with domain names that differ only by TLD, I just suffix the alias with the TLD (50% ambiguity since I might have registered with one site sans suffix, then later discovered the second and used the suffix, but I think I've actually encountered this twice in 5 years).
Also, even though I have the app on my Touch to generate valid aliases, the algorithm itself really isn't that complicated, and might take 40 seconds max to generate "by hand". I COULD make it more complicated if I had to (by parsing through my years of email to build a whitelist of every valid alias ever used to reach me, then requiring NEW aliases to satisfy the more complicated algorithm), but I'll cross THAT bridge when I come to it.
The main point for everyone to take away from this is that you DON'T have to come up with an algorithm that's terribly complex. Even if you did something as trivial as counting the number of characters 'N' in the unique portion of the alias, then use just the Nth letter of the alphabet as the entire authcode, you'd successfully thwart pretty much every spammer in existence, because you just aren't valuable enough as a single individual to any one spammer to be worth the effort. More importantly, any halfwit spammer can safely assume that trying to spam someone who goes to that much trouble to avoid it (and has the technical expertise to pull it off) is a very, VERY dangerous person to screw with.;-)
> Dude, use the above form to critique anti-spam ideas.
The above form would fail it, because it's based on the false premise that a solution can't be useful unless it's universally-applicable so that even the most naive, clueless newbie could personally take advantage of it. I could care less about Joe Sixpack's spam problem. I solved my own, and I occasionally share my solution with my comparably-savvy peers on Slashdot:)
> Do you even score it for spam at all or do you just generate a lot of needless backscatter? I don't bother scoring, just logging the alias to MySQL so another app called by Procmail will reply to the first incoming email addressed to the specific alias, and silently blackhole incoming mail sent to that alias thereafter regardless of where it comes from or from whom it's allegedly coming. The last time I checked, I had about 300 blacklisted aliases in the database. Compared to the ~20k spams per day that get unceremoniously blackholed, I'm really not worried about the 300 backscattered replies that were sent out the first time something was received at that alias. At roughly one or two per average week, there just aren't enough of them to bother caring about.
> I do give you props for embedding it into the address instead of the subject line, as that will let you use it for automated systems, like websites that 'extort' an address, etc.
Actually, I even came up with a "Plan B" solution to use someday if necessary... incorporating the alias into the domain name itself by wildcarding the DNS. For example, "myusername@hexcode.alias.mail.mydomain.org". I'd need a slightly-hacked copy of bind that resolved everything that's allegedly a subdomain of "mail.mydomain.net" to the same IP address and MX, but the general idea's the same.
>What happens when you send something to someone and they reply? Do they have to use your unique address to reply?
Yep. There's even a nice extension for Thunderbird ("Virtual Identity") that lets me send outgoing email with arbitrary return addressess (so if I'M the one initiating contact, I just generate the alias I want them to use to reply to me and use it as the return address so they can just hit 'reply'). Even better, Virtual Identity keeps track of what alias goes with what sender/recipient, so the NEXT time I go to send email to that person, Virtual Identity recognizes their email address and automatically changes the "reply-to" address to the adhoc alias I used the first time I sent email to them.
> What do you do when you need write an email address out or give it over the phone? > goofball-yourdomain-a23fbf32a4e544303... good times.
Compared to the fun I have getting them to spell the domain name (Americanized spelling of Ukranian-Slovak-ish last name), it's really not a problem. I DO, however, have occasional problems with stupid websites that try to be too clever and filter out what THEY think are invalid characters for an email address. Nine times out of 10, it's a javascript validation script with braindamaged regex, and all I have to do to get past it is use Firebug to comment-out their wolf-calling sanity-checker and let it through to the server. Back when I ran my own mail server using Mercury for Win32, ITS primitive adhoc-alias support gave me lots of website grief, because IT used "+" instead of "-" to indicate the division between username and alias, and lots of stupid form-handling code treated "+" as if it were a HTML-encoded space character at the server end.
> Or if someone forwards your message to a 3rd person to reply to you...
In which case I now have two people using the alias to reach me, not one. It's still a vast improvement over having one address you have to guard with your life, and still accept the fact that SOMEONE is eventually going to get their addressbook harvested and compromise it anyway.
The nice thing about my strategy, vs SpamAssasin and Bayesian strategies is that as long as the sender gets the alias right, there's ZERO risk of a legit message getting spam-trapped. A tiny bit of extra work to set up that first email contact, but reliable communication every single time thereafter.
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> What happened to those ultra cheap ARM laptops we were hearing about awhile back, that is what I want to know
Consumers and manufacturers figured out that 7" screens aren't fun to look at, and a sub-GHz ARM won't do streaming video unless you add a coprocessor that bumps the cost up to what you'd spend on an Atom, anyway.
In the US, at least, the Netbook market seems to have found its happy niche for the next year or two: notebooks with 10" screens (small enough to save some cash, but big enough to use comfortably), long battery life (5-6 hours with minimal power management), and more or less the bulk and heft of the original Compaq Contura Aero from the early 90s... the width and depth of an ultraportable, but an inch thick instead of 1/4" thick, and ~3-4 lbs weight. Small enough to comfortably use on an airplane, light enough to fade into the background noise of your consciousness, and cheap enough ($400-500) to skim off the buyers who'd have otherwise bought the loss-leader notebook of the week at Best Buy or OfficeMax.
Part of the reason for the "Aero" metaphor is because I *had* one back in college, and had a major love-hate relationship with it. I loved the fact that it was (for its day) relatively small and light, had great battery life, and could be used just about anywhere with minimal ceremony. HOWEVER... its 7.5" screen was too small, period, and was what ultimately forced me to ditch it for a DEC HiNote Ultra CT475. I always wished someone would make a relatively affordable notebook with a similar form factor to the Aero, but a bigger screen (the Aero had a HUGE bezel) and modern cpu/memory/storage specs. The day arrived about a year ago, and I have a MSI U100 (expanded to 2 gigs) that runs Vista Ultimate like a champ, handles Netbeans, Office 2007, and Visual Studio 2k8 with minimal drama, and plays 720p and 1080i MPEG-2/h.264 video like a champ.
My only complaint? The keyboard. Specifically, the fact that MSI decided to mash the cursor-Tee into the lower-right corner of a straight rectangle to save a few cents instead of letting the cursor keys dangle on a peninsula below the main part of the keyboard, and did it by making the ,./ keys 2/3 the size of the others. The keyboard is already on the "tight" side, and those three keys endlessly drive me crazy. It's the only reason why I DON'T enthusiastically recommend it to others. If they ditch the mashed keyboard on a future model and keep everything else more or less the same, I'll give it 9/10 as a travel computer.
Speaking of uses... lately, I've discovered that it actually makes a shockingly decent -- if unconventional -- ebook reader for Manning/O'Reilly-sized pdf books if you turn it sideways (so the screen is portrait on the right, and the keyboard is on the left) like an open hardcover book (hinge = book spine). 1024 x 600 is *just* big enough to do a decent job of rendering the page if you run acrobat reader full-screen. It's a shame there aren't a few buttons flanking the webcam that can be read as if they were keys on the keyboard... I could definitely think of some good ways to put them to use for an ebook reader :-)
> It means 20 years of waiting for the patent to expire before this kind of interface can be advanced at all.
No, it means Google Android will be the only viable alternative to an iPhone -- in America, at least. Apple can stop HTC from cloning their UI, and they can stop American cell companies from distributing Android phones with an infringing UI pre-installed, but they can't do a damn thing to stop American Android users from downloading code to do it anyway from a server in Bulgaria, Vanatu, Russia, or anywhere else not subject to the long arm of American patent law.
Ditto, for allegedly-infringing open-source extensions for WinMo. Apple wants to sue someone who makes a free shell extension to let HTC phones look like an iPhone? Great... they're awarded 100% of the money he's ever made by selling his infringing product. Oh, wait a minute...
Let's not forget another SEC clusterf**k that causes endless grief to cash (non-margin) investors (especially newbies)... the "1+3 rule".
When you buy shares of stock, the funds are gone from your trading account the instant your order gets fulfilled. But as far as the SEC is concerned, you haven't actually "paid" for the shares until the close of the day's trading, and don't actually OWN the shares until the third business day after the trade.
Why is that a problem? Because the SEC ALSO prohibits cash traders from selling shares they haven't paid for yet... and classifies the act of selling shares you haven't paid for as "free riding", immoral, and deserving of punishment. Since you won't have technically "funded" your purchase until the close of the current day's trading (even though the funds were most certainly taken from your account the moment the purchase was made), it's officially verboten for someone with a cash account to buy shares, then sell the same shares later in the day. Likewise, you're allowed to sell shares of stock, and immediately use the proceeds to buy shares of a second company... but if you do, you're officially prohibited from selling THOSE shares until three days later, and once again subject to nasty punishments if you do.
Nevermind the fact that the funds are committed, seized from your account, beyond your control, and there's absolutely no risk whatsoever that payment won't be made. Or the fact that someone with a margin account funded with at least $25,000 can freely buy shares, sell them 100 milliseconds later, and do it a few more times if they feel like it. Or the fact that someone trading "naked shorts" can sell shares THEY DON'T EVEN FUCKING OWN, with the understanding that they'll buy them from someone else before the end of the day. The fact that your cash is being held in limbo by the broker until the end of the day's trading when you dared to sell the shares you bought earlier in the day to some other person makes you an evil scoundrel somehow trying to cheat the system, reap unjust rewards, and deserving of nasty, draconian punishment.
It's insane.
> Java has been free like beer for ages.
Sort of. Java is free if the end user downloads it directly from Sun and install it himself. If you want to distribute Java along with your own Java-based application in a way that seamlessly installs or updates the JVM if the end user doesn't already have it, you have to pay licensing fees to Sun. Very, very EXPENSIVE licensing fees.
Now... for Slashdot users, yes... Java is free like beer. Downloading and installing it is no big deal, if it hasn't already been done long ago. For J6P and his PHB, it's nontrivial. It's actually a brilliant strategy by Sun. They set the bar for getting it "free" SO LOW that anyone with half a brain and even the most trivial bit of computer knowledge can do it... but as we all know, there are plenty of people for whom that's literally an insurmountable barrier. It also means you can't distribute turnkey solutions based on Java without paying licensing fees. Sun makes quite a bit of money from licensees who developed apps all the way to the point where they were ready to sell, only to discover at the last moment that Java isn't quite as "free" as they thought it was.
Ditto, for MySQL. As long as the end user personally downloads and installs it, it's free. The moment it ends up integrated into your installer, or ships already installed, you have to pay.
Of course, distributing your OWN application as open-source might be enough of a loophole to distribute it together with Java and/or MySQL (or at least an installer that automates its download from Sun and subsequent installation), but once again, it's a surprisingly effective requirement that filters out most real-world commercial scenarios. You can either distribute your application under the GPL, or pay immense licensing fees to Sun.
Personally, I think Sun's management is insane to even THINK about laying off that many employees just to appease the angry gods of Wall Street. And I own lots of largely symbolic stock in Sun that's worth about as much as a pallet of Charmin from Sam's Club, so I *have* paid dearly for the right to hold that view. Wall Street doesn't understand that with a company like Sun, their human capital IS a major portion of the company's real worth and value. When those employees walk out the door after being RIF'ed, millions of dollars worth of Sun's most valuable assets will be going up in smoke. I don't think I'm the only one to hold that view. IMHO, half the reason Sun's stock was so badly punished on Friday, contrary to the predictions of most Wall Street analysts, was because the people who really UNDERSTAND companies like Sun took the news the same way someone would take news about a company intentionally and systematically undertaking the destruction of a major part of its capital assets. Frankly, I'd be happier to see Sun's stock fall below a buck, be delisted, and be pink-sheeted for a few years while R&D continues unimpeded, before Sun gets relisted as a more valuable company, than to see its stock price get jacked back up a whopping 50c or so for a few days amidst Wall Street's jubilation over layoffs... before crashing back down to what it would have been anyway without the layoffs and wanton destruction of Sun's real value.
It's almost enough to make me want to encourage people to buy or sell enough Sun stock to end up with some nice binary number of shares (16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc) as a way of visibly demonstrating support for Sun's long-term R&D over Wall Street's obsession with quarterly profits. Right now, Sun stock is so cheap, you could almost buy 16 shares for $75 including the brokerage commission... but then again, reading about Sun's apparent internal bureaucracy makes me equally want to just say f**k it, dump my shares for $4.60, and walk away.
I used to LOVE Experts Exchange back in 2000, but lost interest in them when they made it nearly impossible to make meaningful use of the site without paying REGARDLESS of how many expert points you'd racked up over the years, or how many "best answers" you'd earned. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend hours of my time building value for them only to be subjected to petty annoyances when I finally need to have one of my OWN questions answered. The fact is, I'd say a majority of the useful answers there are (or at least WERE) contributed by a fairly small core group of users... a group they totally alienated and drove away by their refusal to let that small group "earn its keep" and earn enough points to usefully use the site through barter alone so they could bring in the BULK of the users who just wanted to pay and get their questions answered.
> I dare say that a 1Ghz PC with XP (or even better GNU/Linux) would suffice as a workstation for 80% of office workers.
Ummm... 1GHz pushing it a little far. Let's say 1.6GHz with 2 gigs of RAM ;-)
Anything less than that, and you're going to end up endlessly consuming your support staff's time, because slow computers almost inevitably have problems that fast ones don't. Yeah, it's probably due to user error (filling the input queue with superfluous mouseclicks when Windows appears to be unresponsive because it's madly thrashing something to and from the pagefile, hitting ctrl-alt-delete to kill an app at the worst possible moment, or similar feats)... but it happens. Unless your employees' time has zero value (including the time of your support staff), making them use slow computers is false economy of the worst kind.
Also, there's nothing magic about Linux's resource requirements. A 1GHz PC running KDE or Gnome is going to be every bit as slow and overloaded as a 1GHz PC running Windows XP... if not worse. Launch Open Office's word processor, Thunderbird, and one or two instances of Firefox, and it's going to be brought to its knees every bit as hard as the XP box running the exact same apps.
If nothing else, the fact that Linux is nominally free means there's no excuse for sabotaging your business with underpowered hardware, because you can use the $100-200 savings from Linux to give it double the ram, a 7200rpm hard drive, and a dual-core CPU...
> 2 story/2 people house and you're paying $100/month for power?
Try $360-420/month for a 2 story/2 bedroom townhouse in South Florida, where even grudgingly turned up to 75 degrees, the central a/c is cycled on for at least 18-20 hours/day. According to the thermostat's log, there were days when it was "on" for all but 20-60 minutes over the span of 24 hours. On a few of those days, it was SO HOT outside (96 degrees wet-bulb or higher), the temperature inside crept up to 76 degrees for 2-3 hours despite the air conditioner's most valiant efforts.
> In this case, they are admitting that it is due to the global credit crunch, which I am pretty
> sure is not the CEOs fault, and yet they are firing him anyway.
That's because the most important job of CEO is NOT "running the company", but rather finding capital for the company's operation and growth. When a company needs a $50 million loan, its CEO doesn't walk down to the local bank branch and fill out an application... its CEO has to use his/her social connections to FIND people and institutions capable of lending or investing the money, and CONVINCE them to actually DO it. That's a big part of the reason why (many) CEOs make so much money -- they've proven that they have the ability to raise lots of cash, which is incredibly valuable to the companies that hire them.
In this case, it appears that the old CEO wasn't able to do that critical task well enough, so he was replaced.
IMHO, Tesla is in no danger of going completely belly-up... at least, not until it's lasted long enough to at least build one for Woz. I think it's safe to say that lately he's been going to bed at night dreaming of the one that will eventually take the place of his Prius ;-)
And how, exactly, will this make the slightest difference to someone who buys a domain name, hosts it on a server in another country, and locates the SMTP/POP3/IMAP4 services on nonstandard ports -- encrypted or not? Are they really planning to do deep packet inspection on every byte that flows through a government-monitored router in the UK? Or are they really just clueless enough to believe that everyone in the UK gets their email via their local, government-compliant ISP?
This isn't a rhetorical question... if the real goal is to fight groups like Al-Qaeda, this law will do absolutely NOTHING, because Al-Quaeda *specifically* happens to be run by individuals who seem to be quite a bit more technologically savvy than most members of the British Parliament and US Congress/Senate. If the "host the server elsewhere, on a nonstandard port, and encrypt it if necessary via SSL and/or PGP" solution occurred to me in ~3 seconds while eating breakfast and still slightly groggy after getting up, I suspect "the bad guys" would figure it out almost as quickly ;-)
On the other hand, if terrorism is just an excuse (like it's become in the US), and the real goal is to use it to let law enforcement personnel use email sniffing to fight far more mundane crimes ("d00d, what's your dealer's phone #, and how much is he charging for a dime bag this week?") committed by unsophisticated peons in this week's ${WarOnEverything}, well... it might have a shot.
> Something tells me that an American collection agency is going to have a hard time collecting a foreign debt (with interest!)
> from a Pakistani who goes home to Islamabad. Americans don't have a lot of credit there, pun intended, if you know what I mean.
Maybe... but they'd have no difficulty at all ruthlessly hounding down an engineer who moved back to London, Sydney, Trondheim (Norway), Munich, or even Brasilia, Buenos Aires, or Santiago. Remember, we're not talking about sweatshop factory workers... we're talking about people who are among the best & brightest in their industry, with American companies bidding against companies in other countries to attract them as employees.
The biggest problem with American immigration law is its schizophrenic goal of reuniting families (dropping any and all standards for extended family members once the first member is approved) while hating immigrants in general (partly due to the results of the all-encompassing family-reunion goal). This is a real business problem, because it does hurt the ability of American firms to recruit and hire the world's best and brightest. Increasingly, we've HAD candidates (especially from Britain and Scandinavia) tell us point blank that we couldn't pay them enough to move to the US. Period, full-stop, end of story. Canada, sure. But America? As far as they're concerned, we've turned into a mean, paranoid police state that automatically treats foreigners like criminals. Accurate or not, that's increasingly the perception held by foreign professionals about life in America, and it's definitely hurting our competitiveness against companies in countries like Canada that are willing to roll out the red carpet and treat them like welcome, valued guests.
> The majority of the H-1B's that I've worked with have been bright, intelligent, and
> talented individuals with skillsets not easily available in my market (Midwest).
Ditto. At my company (major telco), my H-1B coworkers make just as much as we (the Americans) do (taking into account the increased administrative costs, probably 10% MORE).
The article is a bit sensationalistic, lumping just about anything that's the slightest violation of the rules into the "fraud" category. Truth be told, some of the rules (like forcing employees to leave the country immediately within 10 days of termination) would make it absolutely impossible to recruit viable employees if they were rigidly enforced. Think about it... someone who makes $80-100k is going to have a nice apartment (or buy a house), and drive a nice car with expensive payments. If their job gets eliminated, the lease/mortgage on their apt/condo/house and loan on their car isn't going to just go away, and if they TRIED to just walk away from them, you can bet the creditors would do their best to follow them "home". It's completely unrealistic to expect a highly-paid professional to take a job almost guaranteed to leave them financially destroyed if they were laid off. At least, the kind of employees WORTH hiring under H-1B.
People who think those rules are reasonable should ask themselves... as an American, how much money would an employer somewhere like Sweden, Dubai, France, South Africa, or Australia have to offer YOU to take a job there, with the caveat that you could be laid off at any time, with no benefits, no compensation for the cost of moving your stuff back to the US, and laws that simultaneously require you to leave the country immediately if terminated, yet remain fully liable for any and all costs arising from broken leases, defaulted mortgages or car loans, or anything else of that nature? Most H-1B employees at my company aren't starving, desperate people from third-world countries grateful for any job at all.... they're people who are the cream of the crop, who'd get paid a shitload of cash in their own countries and have to be offered even more to put up with the crap our government subjects them to. The way INS treats them, it's a miracle we can get them to come work for us at all. I know *I'd* tell any government that tried to treat me as badly as ours treats non-American professionals to go fuck itself and die.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again in the hope that someone from Microsoft might actually see this and have it sink in...
If a program wants to create a new directory in c:\program files, that's not really a big deal.
If a program wants to overwrite an existing non-executable file in an EXISTING directory of c:\program files, it's probably worth bothering me about.
If a program wants to overwrite an existing executable file, dll, or device driver... or change a shortcut to point to a different file... THAT is a very, VERY big deal that merits my full attention.
What Windows 7 REALLY needs is a way to run untrusted programs (untrusted by ME, not untrusted by Hollywood) in a chroot jail, complete with firewalled network access, spoofed system and registry settings, and parallel-universe copies of system files. Basically, a way to run apps that might be outright trojans in a way that limits the scope of their damage to their own subdirectory tree and phantom system files that are meaningful only to that app.
Hell, Microsoft OWNS VirtualPC. DO SOMETHING with it. Give me an option that basically works something like, "Spawn a virgin installation of Windows... updated, but crap-free, with Explorer (the file manager) NOT spawned by default, and windows opening up in windows managed by the "real" hypervising-copy of Windows 7... then copy the installer to that instance's chroot jail, and launch it. Going forward, spawn the virtual instance of Windows, then launch the app in it." Think: the long-awaited sequel to WinOS/2... 15 years late, but better late than never ;-)
The acid test: make it so someone can install a DRM'ed game that's a shameless rootkit (Starforce comes to mind...), emulating Windows well enough with phantom files (any files the program changes are local copies that apply only to the session that spawned them) and spoofed drivers so the Evil App never even realizes it's not screwing up the user's PC. Then be very, VERY anal about warning the user before anything is able to change a "global" (common to all instances of Windows spawned under the hypervisor) setting or file. Big hint... if you don't, Sun or VMware eventually WILL.
> Pah. The "average citizen" is busy on bittorrent without a worry about "fair use".
Pah. The "average citizen" is busy on bittorrent^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h
YOUTUBE without a worry about "fair use".
There. Fixed it for ya! :)
IMHO, the situation is more like, "An average citizen has no hope of negotiating the legal minefield for any kind of profit, but can use Youtube as an expressive media for personal gratification and let THEIR army of lawyers deal with the licensing arrangements that would otherwise make its creation and distribution impossible."
Aside from the harm created by perpetual copyright, the other big problem with IP law right now is the transaction costs of licensing. Want to make your own Southpark episode starring Beavis & Butthead? Good luck getting the media firms responsible for licensing them to even return your phone call unless Trey Parker, Matt Stone, AND Mike Judge personally intervene on your behalf to cut the red tape. Otherwise, you'll be spending several thousand dollars per hour, plus expenses, on negotiations ultimately leading to boilerplate licensing fees so outrageous, even the lawyers will admit that they're intended more to weed people out than actually open up new business possibilities. To them, you're *so far* below the commercial radar, you're wasting their time. Ergo, Youtube's ultimate business model... leveraging the economies of scale that only a major media conglomerate can afford to hammer out bulk licensing deals for content that's not quite lucrative enough to justify dealing with the parties individually.
> My main worry about these netbooks is video decoding
Video decoding is fairly easy... it's ENCODING that really sucks down the CPU cycles. Old computers didn't have problems decoding video in realtime because they were too slow... they choked because they didn't have enough RAM to keep everything related to the video buffered in physical RAM, and keep it there while doing other background tasks. The moment you start getting page faults and swapping things out to hard drive, all bets are off... even with a dual-core CPU.
I just bought a MSI Wind a few days ago (with second SoDIMM for 2 gigs total). It's surprisingly fast, even for things like Netbeans and Visual Studio. The key? Lots and lots of RAM. Avoid swapping, and everything else falls into place... even with a "slow" CPU. A Vista/XP/Linux-with-Compiz notebook with 2 gigs, 5400RPM hard drive, and a 500MHz Pentium III will probably provide better real-world performance than a "modern" budget notebook with 512mb, ~2GHz Celeron M, and 4200RPM hard drive because the "faster" new one will run out of RAM almost immediately and be shackled to its slow hard drive, while the "slower" old one will chug along nicely because it doesn't have to keep violently lurching back and forth as it swaps things between physical ram and the hard drive.
Personally, I think there's only one thing that can really make all-electric cars & trucks viable for long-distance travel... some kind of side-mounted power rail accessible to cars driving in the leftmost lane on interstate highways that gas-fueled cars can ignore, but electric cars can dynamically draw power from for long-distance travel (falling back on their battery when changing lanes, passing, not following a left exit, etc). Of course, there'd need to be some standardized means of metering and billing drivers for electricity actually used, and IMHO the most viable place to put the rail is probably in a cut immediately to the left of the leftmost lane, depressed ~2 inches below surface height when the road is resurfaced (so the surrounding road gradually wears down until it's level). There'd be a shock hazard for anyone carelessly walking around... but arguably, someone walking around in the emergency lane on a freeway is at fairly major risk of getting hit by a car at any time, anyway, so it's really not upping the risk that much. Ask any highway patrolman how many instances he's aware of where someone ended up hitting a car stopped in the emergency lane, and that car ended up injuring or killing someone standing nearby...
> There isn't anyone worth $35 million (or whatever it was) for 19 days of work.
Weeeellllll... that's often (if not usually) true, but not *quite* 100%. People tend to forget that the most important job of a large corporation's CEO *ISN'T* running the company... it's finding people willing to lend large sums of money to the company, or buy lots of its stock (not just 100 shares). When a small business needs to buy a new computer, the owner probably puts it on a credit card he personally had to guarantee, or finances it through someone like Dell (also assuming a role as personal guarantor of the debt). Raising the funds to buy two hundred THOUSAND laptops or computers (or company cars, or square feet of floor tile, or just about *anything* for that matter) is several orders of magnitude more challenging. The CEO of McDonald's doesn't just walk into the bank's nearest branch to fill out a credit application for a $50 million loan... he has to personally go out and FIND people willing to invest the cash. Sometimes the role might be delegated to a Wall Street securities firm, but for really HUGE loans, the CEO better be pretty damn good at playing golf, and knowing how to tactfully let the prospective investor he's trying to woo win by a few strokes.
Likewise, everyone likes to criticize "golden parachutes", but they have an important purpose, too. Think about it for a moment. If a company gets bought by another company, it's CEO is almost certainly going to be unemployed (or at least no longer CEO). It's not inconceivable that the best interests of the stockholders (who, through the President, hire the CEO to act in their best interests when managing the company) might collide with the personal best interests of the CEO (who, like anyone else, would probably prefer to remain employed as CEO rather than sign his own employment "death warrant"). During a prospective merger, NOBODY is in a better position to torpedo and sabotage it than the CEO. So... we have golden parachutes, made part of the CEO's employment contract to ensure that he'll walk away from a merger happy and satisfied, and will do everything he can to help facilitate such a merger. It's really not much different from "retention bonuses" offered to IT professionals when their positions are planned for elimination at some point in the future to encourage them to stick around until the end, instead of bolting for a new company at the first opportunity. Do some go overboard? Of course. But it's important to keep in mind that they DO have a purpose, and don't just exist to let wealthy CEOs live lives of luxury.
As for CEO salaries... well... part of THAT is pure public relations. If you have $100 million to invest in a company, you're going to look for evidence that the company is doing well financially. Wal Mart can get away with the "po' country folk" act, because everyone on planet earth knows they're one of the world's most powerful retailers. JustAnother Co, Inc. doesn't quite have that option. Rhetoric aside, few big-time investors are genuinely impressed by threadbare & penny-pinching companies, because those type of companies might chug along for decades, but aren't likely to ever really strike it wildly rich. Big investors aren't interested in them. If they want safe, conservative investments, they'll buy more stock in Verizon, AT&T, Florida Power & Light, or some other utility that's practically a government-guaranteed investment with legislatively-mandated rate of return. The big investors are more interested in companies with a small risk of going broke, and a high chance of becoming wildly successful.
So... getting back to the quote from the parent post... a CEO who does nothing but go to board meetings and leads the company to destruction is clearly not worth $35 million for ANY length of time. On the other hand, a CEO who uses those 19 days to raise $250 million in needed capital for the company by taking advantage of his personal connections is worth every penny of it, and more. Most of the REALLY egregious
Plus, Facebook has (at least) one fundamental flaw: it assumes you WANT everyone who you're "friends" with to indiscriminately know about everyone ELSE you're "friends" with. It ignores the fact that you don't necessarily WANT your kid brother (or coworkers, or parents) reading about your wild weekend (or at least not the full details you'd share with your best and closest friends).
What's needed is a social networking site with a concept of groups as containers for acquaintances and other groups, applying permissions in the order of default-deny, groups with permission, groups denied, individuals permitted, individuals denied. THEN, when you post something, you'd be able to specify its visibility scope across those groups... possibly, even creating fake or munged entries for some groups to see in lieu of "real" entries, and NO way for acquaintances to discern which group(s) they're in, or even which groups exist at all.
Then, you could create a safe, bland (semi-)public page for (almost) everyone to see, but let the appropriate acquaintances see things appropriate to their relationship with you... and possibly even maintain one or more "parallel universes" that completely override each other for people with two or more groups of friends that should (ideally) NEVER encounter each other (parents and drinking buddies being an obvious example). Ideally, you could even set up one or more "duress" passwords that logged you in as an admin for your profile with access to only a subset of your real one, in case someone like a girlfriend or family member coerced you into logging in with them present to "prove" something. By allowing an unlimited number of duress passwords with unlimited groups and parallel universes, you'd effectively achieve plausible deniability... nobody could ever force you to reveal things, because they could never know for sure whether you were logged in with a duress password or your real one.
The sad thing is, a feature like THIS would be the perfect way to monetize something like Facebook... keeping the current model free, but charging monthly or annual fees to add more sophisticated group management and/or depth.
^^^ note... I know that solar water heating systems != photovoltaic arrays. The point is that big panels of ANY kind on a roof in areas guaranteed to be hit by hurricanes aren't going to last for more than a few years before getting destroyed. Solar water heating was fairly cheap and low-tech, and was wiped out by the threat of hurricane damage. I suspect photovoltaic arrays costing tens or hundreds of dollars apiece (with dozens or hundreds needed to generate any meaningful amount of power) won't exactly fare much better with either hurricanes OR consumers here. ;-)
> I for one look forward to the day where my garage has a solar panel on the roof and my full electric car charges ... as long as you don't live in Florida or somewhere else vulnerable to hurricanes. Solar hot water heaters became VERY popular here during the 80s and early 90s... until Andrew destroyed every single one in Dade County, insurance companies refused to insure them because they're pretty much GUARANTEED to sustain expensive damage in even a mild hurricane, and the sale of new ones pretty much ended... then the parade of hurricanes in 2004 destroyed just about every single solar hot water heating system in the state.
> overnight costing me ZERO dollars to "fill up".
Could they be made hurricane-proof? Unlikely, short of building the roof from concrete, anchoring the panels with steel bands embedded into that concrete, and putting half-inch aquarium-glass or aluminum oxide covers on them (which might affect their performance in addition to making them prohibitively expensive). Could you take them down and stow them inside the house? Well, it depends... how enthusiastic are you about carrying a hundred or more heavy rectangular panels at least the size of a half sheet of drywall down a ladder, one at a time... moving all the furniture in the living room to make room for them, putting down plastic (they're dirty, after all... don't want to ruin the floorcovering), carrying them inside, piling them up... then repeating the whole process, in reverse, after the hurricane? Moving a few panels inside is one thing... moving an entire ROOF's worth of them is another matter entirely.
Unless gas were to become PROHIBITIVELY expensive (as in, $8-10+/gallon) and/or the electricity used to recharge the car came from nuclear power, the likelihood of all-electric travel being cheaper over the car's lifetime in absolute terms than gas-electric hybrids, or even fuel-efficient internal combustion engine cars, is low.
Gas-electric hybrids make a certain amount of sense, because they provide two traction systems that are each optimized for the two most common scenarios encountered by typical American drivers:
* An internal combustion engine for travel at highway (45+ mph speeds). Internal combustion engines are EXCEPTIONALLY efficient when used to move a car 45+ mph, because that's the load they're optimized for. The reason why fuel economy goes down the toilet in congested city traffic is because the engine ends up running almost as hard, and burning almost as much fuel per MINUTE sitting in stop and go traffic as it would driving 45+mph on a freeway during that same minute.
* An electric traction motor for use in stop-and-go congestion. When the car isn't moving, the only load is the air conditioner and 80x4+180-watt (RMS) amp being driven by the car's entertainment system. HOWEVER, electric traction motors powered by gas-fueled generators utterly SUCK compared to internal combustion engines when it comes to total operating costs over long distances at highway speeds. Put another way, if you make an electric car with a battery big enough to go 10-20 miles, a generator for longer-distance travel, and you drive 250 miles at 70mph on an interstate using that generator... it's going to take about twice as much gas, and cost twice as much money, to drive those 250 miles compared to what someone with a car that even PRETENDS to be fuel-efficient. That's why nobody makes hybrid gas-electric cars that rely on a gas-fired generator for their primary power source... if you actually RELIED on that generator to any real degree, you'd end up buying double the gas as someone with a "normal" car.
Toyota has it right. When you cut the crap and throw away the environmentalist ideology, the most cost-effective solution is to build higher-end vehicles with BOTH internal combustion AND electric traction motors (especially things like SUVs that get used mostly in urban stop-and-go traffic), and use whichever one is more efficient for the current driving conditions. At the lowest end (cheap cars for poor people), you're better off sticking with cheap, lightweight, and fuel-efficient internal combustion engines, because someone in THAT market bracket is unlikely to see enough savings in gas costs over the life of the car to offset its higher manufacturing cost. Even if it's "only" $5,000 more. Add the interest expense of piling another $5,000 into the loan amount for 60 months, and any pretense of cost-efficiency goes completely out the window.
> How many emails do you send a day to people you have never communicated with
> ( which would be the number of times you would have to retrieve a new hash-acct address from their server) ?
I'd say I might average 3-5 in a typical week. As others have noted, it's a one-time hassle that "just works" for effortless future communication going forward with that individual. Remembering the aliases is no big deal, because I have a few rules I always follow for generating them that inevitably narrows down the list of possibilities to a single obvious one, or maybe 2 or 3 plausible ones. For websites, I generate them in the form 'myaccount-hostnamewithoutdotcomnetetc.validationcode@mydomain.org'. So for something like Amazon, it would be something like 'foo-amazon.d2m@mydomain.org'. For rare occasions where there are two or more sites with domain names that differ only by TLD, I just suffix the alias with the TLD (50% ambiguity since I might have registered with one site sans suffix, then later discovered the second and used the suffix, but I think I've actually encountered this twice in 5 years).
Also, even though I have the app on my Touch to generate valid aliases, the algorithm itself really isn't that complicated, and might take 40 seconds max to generate "by hand". I COULD make it more complicated if I had to (by parsing through my years of email to build a whitelist of every valid alias ever used to reach me, then requiring NEW aliases to satisfy the more complicated algorithm), but I'll cross THAT bridge when I come to it.
The main point for everyone to take away from this is that you DON'T have to come up with an algorithm that's terribly complex. Even if you did something as trivial as counting the number of characters 'N' in the unique portion of the alias, then use just the Nth letter of the alphabet as the entire authcode, you'd successfully thwart pretty much every spammer in existence, because you just aren't valuable enough as a single individual to any one spammer to be worth the effort. More importantly, any halfwit spammer can safely assume that trying to spam someone who goes to that much trouble to avoid it (and has the technical expertise to pull it off) is a very, VERY dangerous person to screw with. ;-)
> Dude, use the above form to critique anti-spam ideas.
The above form would fail it, because it's based on the false premise that a solution can't be useful unless it's universally-applicable so that even the most naive, clueless newbie could personally take advantage of it. I could care less about Joe Sixpack's spam problem. I solved my own, and I occasionally share my solution with my comparably-savvy peers on Slashdot :)
> Do you even score it for spam at all or do you just generate a lot of needless backscatter?
I don't bother scoring, just logging the alias to MySQL so another app called by Procmail will reply to the first incoming email addressed to the specific alias, and silently blackhole incoming mail sent to that alias thereafter regardless of where it comes from or from whom it's allegedly coming. The last time I checked, I had about 300 blacklisted aliases in the database. Compared to the ~20k spams per day that get unceremoniously blackholed, I'm really not worried about the 300 backscattered replies that were sent out the first time something was received at that alias. At roughly one or two per average week, there just aren't enough of them to bother caring about.
> I do give you props for embedding it into the address instead of the subject line, as that will let you use it for automated systems, like websites that 'extort' an address, etc.
Actually, I even came up with a "Plan B" solution to use someday if necessary... incorporating the alias into the domain name itself by wildcarding the DNS. For example, "myusername@hexcode.alias.mail.mydomain.org". I'd need a slightly-hacked copy of bind that resolved everything that's allegedly a subdomain of "mail.mydomain.net" to the same IP address and MX, but the general idea's the same.
>What happens when you send something to someone and they reply? Do they have to use your unique address to reply?
Yep. There's even a nice extension for Thunderbird ("Virtual Identity") that lets me send outgoing email with arbitrary return addressess (so if I'M the one initiating contact, I just generate the alias I want them to use to reply to me and use it as the return address so they can just hit 'reply'). Even better, Virtual Identity keeps track of what alias goes with what sender/recipient, so the NEXT time I go to send email to that person, Virtual Identity recognizes their email address and automatically changes the "reply-to" address to the adhoc alias I used the first time I sent email to them.
> What do you do when you need write an email address out or give it over the phone?
> goofball-yourdomain-a23fbf32a4e544303... good times.
Compared to the fun I have getting them to spell the domain name (Americanized spelling of Ukranian-Slovak-ish last name), it's really not a problem. I DO, however, have occasional problems with stupid websites that try to be too clever and filter out what THEY think are invalid characters for an email address. Nine times out of 10, it's a javascript validation script with braindamaged regex, and all I have to do to get past it is use Firebug to comment-out their wolf-calling sanity-checker and let it through to the server. Back when I ran my own mail server using Mercury for Win32, ITS primitive adhoc-alias support gave me lots of website grief, because IT used "+" instead of "-" to indicate the division between username and alias, and lots of stupid form-handling code treated "+" as if it were a HTML-encoded space character at the server end.
> Or if someone forwards your message to a 3rd person to reply to you...
In which case I now have two people using the alias to reach me, not one. It's still a vast improvement over having one address you have to guard with your life, and still accept the fact that SOMEONE is eventually going to get their addressbook harvested and compromise it anyway.
The nice thing about my strategy, vs SpamAssasin and Bayesian strategies is that as long as the sender gets the alias right, there's ZERO risk of a legit message getting spam-trapped. A tiny bit of extra work to set up that first email contact, but reliable communication every single time thereafter.