The big difference is that the US got widespread ADSL earlier than most countries, and the average density of telco COs is such that it's really hard to get past 3-6 Mbps without running new wires. So what you're really seeing is a reflection of the ratios between houses served by ADSL, Cable Modem, and newer technologies (such as fiber-to-the-home and fiber-to-the-block.)
The real question is what you're going to do with all that bandwidth - Bittorrent will happily use any bandwidth you've got, 3 Mbps is fast enough for YouTube, 56kbps was plenty for email, but basically anybody who's trying to sell you more than 6 Mbps is trying to sell you Television-over-IP to compete with the other providers of "500 channels and nothing on". Television's Boring, and we've already got it - What cool stuff are you using that needs the bandwidth?
Yes, we always thought X Windows was a bit bloated, back in the late 80s, on a 386/33. I don't remember how much RAM it had (if I still have to files to look that up, they're on a 9-track tape or maybe a 60MB Sun cartridge...) It was a bit faster than running NeWS on a diskless Sun3/50 with 8MB RAM, but NeWS was so much cleaner most of the time that it was the better system.
I worked for Bell Labs back in the day that we could get the library to order technical journals for us - so I had them get a subscription to 2600. And everybody was fine with that, because it did have useful and interesting information. (This was after in-band signaling had become pretty much universal and blue boxes didn't usually work any more, but before 2600 had become mostly a computer magazine.)
Even without the Javascript leakage, fonts leak a lot of information. My browser showed up as unique (until I tried connecting with both Mozilla and IE, and with NoScript on and off under Mozilla), because I was the only person with the couple of fonts used by my company for their logo and branding. And even without that, if you downloaded that cool Elvish font, and that fairly clean monospaced console font, that probably makes you unique.
Browsing would be a lot more private if you could choose which fonts you actually want the browser to export, as opposed to having Mozilla automatically export everything your machine has. In general, I've got no interest in having all those decorative things show up in my browser; I'd prefer to have just a couple of fonts advertised.
Apparently the Mexican's tend to call the Texas part of it "Santa Ana's War", and not with respect for his competence.
After the 1846 war ended, the original surrender terms proposed by the Mexican government not only included the northern states that are now most of the western US, but also the states of Chihuahua and Sonora, so we would have ended up with a lot of Indian territory that the Mexicans hadn't begun to conquer successfully. By the time the dealing was done, they weren't part of it.
They're not traitors if they've got the right to secede, which they did. On the other hand, support for secession wasn't close to universal, and may not have even been the majority; it was primarily the rich slave-owning land-holders who were represented in government.
In some of the Hawaii airports, the small inter-island flights are at the commuter terminal, which doesn't go through TSA inspection theater line. They still want to see your papers, and the other privacy invasion is that they need your weight, which is going to determine where you sit on the plane (I end up in back with the Samoans:-), but basically the security rules figure that crashing a 10-seater Cessna into a building isn't enough Mass Destruction to be a National Security Threat. General Aviation seems to work about the same way - at least at SFO, you can just drive up to the executive terminal and park. If you wanted to get onto the runway, a pair of bolt cutters would get you through any security.
Remember that disk drives aren't just logical storage containers, they're rotating machinery. If you're using a drive this big, you're probably trying to store lots of stuff on it, and you don't want that storage process to be interfered with by rotating or seeking the disk to some other location to grab programs or store random files from other applications, so either put the OS and application software on another physical disk (or mirrored pair), or put them on flash drives or even SSD if you're feeling spendy.
Also, from an operations standpoint, the way you handle large data storage is enough different from the way you handle infrastructure and applications that you probably want to keep them separate anyway. Maybe you're using the 3TB drives to build RAID arrays or databases, maybe the 3TB is in an external-SATA shoebox that you want to be able to replace, or whatever - it's a lot cleaner to keep it separate, and if you can afford the latest biggest drive on the market, you can not only afford the extra $50 for a drive for your OS, you'll save it in operations and maintenance costs.
A few months ago Amazon repossessed every copy of 1984 they'd sold to Kindle users. In the process, this deleted all the notes that a user had made in his copy, and he decided that this was double-plus ungood and sued them. If I were to guess, I'd say that by making backups of everybody's notes and highlights, they're trying to give themselves a defense for the next time they want to make something an un-book.
There are different business models out there. Sure, if Nigeria's on either end of the deal, the check's bogus, and it's a one-shot scam (unless they can sell your name to somebody who's going to tell you they're the Nigerian National Bank's Fraud Inspection Division, trying to catch that Evil Miscreant who ripped you off, because you're now a known sucker.)
But sometimes, the deal comes from a legitimate criminal enterprise who actually do want to launder and move money, whether they're drug dealers or extortionists or whatever, and they'd prefer to find mules they can use multiple times and it's cheaper than other ways to move the money.
And then again, they could be longer-con scammers who are willing to pay you a few bucks on the first few checks so that you'll trust them, and then they'll send you a bigger check that really is bogus.
I think my sister probably got dragged into it by her kids, but she dragged my other sister into it, and then my brother, then me, and apparently several of my cousins are also there. So if she puts up new pictures of what her kid's doing, Facebook sends mail to my spambox email account, which I now have to check more often because that's where friend requests from my real-life friends show up, along with the "happy birthday" notes from people who think the Jan 1 1900 I gave FB is my real birthday. At least it doesn't get most of the messages about friends sending icons with cute little farm toys or new black helicopters for their MafiaWars characters yet.
Privacy Models vs. Flexibility in Social networks
on
Creating a Better Facebook
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The real trick here is how they build the communications and privacy models - how much data is open, how do they share it, what can you do with it - and how that affects what kinds of features you can build using it. You could build something like Livejournal on a pretty tight system with no central data storage, but it'd be harder to find your ex-girlfriend's cousin's third-grade-teacher's dog's picture and send it a cute icon of a fire hydrant. Or if you build a system that's really good at both of those, then you'll have tradeoffs in how much data you have to ship around, so your DSL connection is 98% full of encrypted packets for your friends' friends' friends' searches, and your query gets you a dialog box about "your posting may cost the net hundreds or thousands of dollars."
And that flexibility is important, not only for the kinds of marketing people who want to monetize everything, but also for the people who want to maintain the community and keep all of those users around and interested, as opposed to having them disappear like Friendster or Orkut users who had their fifteen minutes of fame and six months of friend invitations from cute guys in Brazil. Livejournal seems to be doing ok with it, but Facebook gets a lot of social involvement out of all of that Farmville and Mafia Wars stuff, and the question becomes how to facilitate the social networking effects of it without also the mass information-leakage.
There's just one problem with Think Progress' claim: It's not, well, accurate. In a case of truth being stranger than astroturf, it turns out that the PowerPoint document was prepared as a class project for a competition in Florida last month. It cost the six students a grand total of $173.95, including $18 for clip art..... The competition was organized by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a nonprofit, free-market group that....
It was an MBA class project to create a marketing campaign for a think tank to SELL to a telecom company on a $100 budget, and it wasn't even the winning entry for the class. So yeah, it's a Powerpoint that's just waiting to cause trouble.
So it's meta-Astroturf , not genuine Astroturf(tm) fake grass product as-seen-on-TV. And these meddling liberals have just burned it (without even filing an Environmental Impact Report about the effects of flame on Astroturf!)
There's just one problem with Think Progress' claim: It's not, well, accurate. In a case of truth being stranger than astroturf, it turns out that the PowerPoint document was prepared as a class project for a competition in Florida last month. It cost the six students a grand total of $173.95, including $18 for clip art..... The competition was organized by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a nonprofit, free-market group that....
It was an MBA class project to create a marketing campaign for a think tank to SELL to a telecom company on a $100 budget, and it wasn't even the winning entry for the class.
What I want is the opposite kind of pointing stick - something like a Wacom tablet that lets me use one hand to point at letters to use as a keyboard replacement. Back when I had a Palm Pilot, it could do that (or use Graffiti), but anything I've seen for the Wacom so far seems to use it as a mouse instead. Is there anything like that out there?
Thinkpad keyboards have cost me a couple of years of thumb joint pain, because they've an attractive nuisance encouraging me to turn my thumb in odd ways to use their left-hand alt keys.
And unfortunately I've had to mostly give up playing mountain dulcimer because the hand positioning that my teacher uses uses the left thumb a lot (there are tradeoffs between speed, chord options, and hand vs. arm motion) and there's a couple years worth of stuff to unlearn and relearn if I want to do cool stuff again.
Yeah, some chiropractors are quacks, and some of the theories behind chiropractic are bogus; obviously anybody who tells you they're going to cure the plague by adjusting your back should be avoided like, uhh, whatever...
However, chiropractors are specialists in back and neck pain, and these days they do get a good education in anatomy, muscles, tendons, etc. As a computer abuser, I've dealt with their profession over many years. Some are good, some aren't, one was also an MD (he did the chiro first, then got into "real medicine". I've had a chiropractor tell me that, sorry, he don't do shoulders, see an MD. My current chiropractor has been able to tell me a lot about what's going on inside my rotator cuff and does a lot of the same things that a physical therapist did when I had problems on the other shoulder a few years ago (on the other hand, she's not much help with non-carpal-tunnel hand problems other than advising general exercise, and will tell you that, but she's really good with elbow mechanics.)
One thing I've noticed over the years is that a lot of people in the chiropractic and physical therapy businesses got into it as a result of injuries that exposed them to the practice. A couple of them used crutches (I think it was the chiro who'd wrecked a motorcycle and the PT had wrecked a car, and hip replacement technology has gotten really good for old people but wasn't quite ready for young active people.) Another PT had a black eye when I first met her - she was a rugby player, so she was a frequent patient at her shop, at least on Mondays, as well as a practitioner.
Vim has about twice as many options as vi did back when I ran it on dumb terminals on a Vax 11/780. My laptop CPU is about 3000 times as fast (per core), and the 4GB RAM is 4x as large as the disk drives on my VAX, or 1000 times as large as the RAM. And yes, running it on top of WinXP is probably tougher than running on top of X Windows, but X ran just fine on a Sun3/60 or 25 MHz 386. (I suppose I should pay more attention and turn off random modes like +farsi, though:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The big difference is that the US got widespread ADSL earlier than most countries, and the average density of telco COs is such that it's really hard to get past 3-6 Mbps without running new wires. So what you're really seeing is a reflection of the ratios between houses served by ADSL, Cable Modem, and newer technologies (such as fiber-to-the-home and fiber-to-the-block.)
The real question is what you're going to do with all that bandwidth - Bittorrent will happily use any bandwidth you've got, 3 Mbps is fast enough for YouTube, 56kbps was plenty for email, but basically anybody who's trying to sell you more than 6 Mbps is trying to sell you Television-over-IP to compete with the other providers of "500 channels and nothing on". Television's Boring, and we've already got it - What cool stuff are you using that needs the bandwidth?
And you couldn't even turn it off. And Skr1pt K1dd13z no longer remember all the horrible attacks you could use because of it....
I think the original versions of Opera had Javascript as well - the whole thing fit on half a floppy disk.
Yes, we always thought X Windows was a bit bloated, back in the late 80s, on a 386/33. I don't remember how much RAM it had (if I still have to files to look that up, they're on a 9-track tape or maybe a 60MB Sun cartridge...) It was a bit faster than running NeWS on a diskless Sun3/50 with 8MB RAM, but NeWS was so much cleaner most of the time that it was the better system.
I worked for Bell Labs back in the day that we could get the library to order technical journals for us - so I had them get a subscription to 2600. And everybody was fine with that, because it did have useful and interesting information. (This was after in-band signaling had become pretty much universal and blue boxes didn't usually work any more, but before 2600 had become mostly a computer magazine.)
Annoying that Google Translate doesn't support Latin; mine has mostly paged out to long-unused memory...
Even without the Javascript leakage, fonts leak a lot of information. My browser showed up as unique (until I tried connecting with both Mozilla and IE, and with NoScript on and off under Mozilla), because I was the only person with the couple of fonts used by my company for their logo and branding. And even without that, if you downloaded that cool Elvish font, and that fairly clean monospaced console font, that probably makes you unique.
Browsing would be a lot more private if you could choose which fonts you actually want the browser to export, as opposed to having Mozilla automatically export everything your machine has. In general, I've got no interest in having all those decorative things show up in my browser; I'd prefer to have just a couple of fonts advertised.
Apparently the Mexican's tend to call the Texas part of it "Santa Ana's War", and not with respect for his competence.
After the 1846 war ended, the original surrender terms proposed by the Mexican government not only included the northern states that are now most of the western US, but also the states of Chihuahua and Sonora, so we would have ended up with a lot of Indian territory that the Mexicans hadn't begun to conquer successfully. By the time the dealing was done, they weren't part of it.
They're not traitors if they've got the right to secede, which they did. On the other hand, support for secession wasn't close to universal, and may not have even been the majority; it was primarily the rich slave-owning land-holders who were represented in government.
In some of the Hawaii airports, the small inter-island flights are at the commuter terminal, which doesn't go through TSA inspection theater line. They still want to see your papers, and the other privacy invasion is that they need your weight, which is going to determine where you sit on the plane (I end up in back with the Samoans :-), but basically the security rules figure that crashing a 10-seater Cessna into a building isn't enough Mass Destruction to be a National Security Threat. General Aviation seems to work about the same way - at least at SFO, you can just drive up to the executive terminal and park. If you wanted to get onto the runway, a pair of bolt cutters would get you through any security.
It's not just a joke - a couple of TSA employees just got in the news for getting into a fight because one of them said the naked-passenger-scanner showed that the other guy had a small penis.
Remember that disk drives aren't just logical storage containers, they're rotating machinery. If you're using a drive this big, you're probably trying to store lots of stuff on it, and you don't want that storage process to be interfered with by rotating or seeking the disk to some other location to grab programs or store random files from other applications, so either put the OS and application software on another physical disk (or mirrored pair), or put them on flash drives or even SSD if you're feeling spendy.
Also, from an operations standpoint, the way you handle large data storage is enough different from the way you handle infrastructure and applications that you probably want to keep them separate anyway. Maybe you're using the 3TB drives to build RAID arrays or databases, maybe the 3TB is in an external-SATA shoebox that you want to be able to replace, or whatever - it's a lot cleaner to keep it separate, and if you can afford the latest biggest drive on the market, you can not only afford the extra $50 for a drive for your OS, you'll save it in operations and maintenance costs.
A few months ago Amazon repossessed every copy of 1984 they'd sold to Kindle users. In the process, this deleted all the notes that a user had made in his copy, and he decided that this was double-plus ungood and sued them. If I were to guess, I'd say that by making backups of everybody's notes and highlights, they're trying to give themselves a defense for the next time they want to make something an un-book.
There are different business models out there. Sure, if Nigeria's on either end of the deal, the check's bogus, and it's a one-shot scam (unless they can sell your name to somebody who's going to tell you they're the Nigerian National Bank's Fraud Inspection Division, trying to catch that Evil Miscreant who ripped you off, because you're now a known sucker.)
But sometimes, the deal comes from a legitimate criminal enterprise who actually do want to launder and move money, whether they're drug dealers or extortionists or whatever, and they'd prefer to find mules they can use multiple times and it's cheaper than other ways to move the money.
And then again, they could be longer-con scammers who are willing to pay you a few bucks on the first few checks so that you'll trust them, and then they'll send you a bigger check that really is bogus.
and your father smelled of elderberries...
I think my sister probably got dragged into it by her kids, but she dragged my other sister into it, and then my brother, then me, and apparently several of my cousins are also there. So if she puts up new pictures of what her kid's doing, Facebook sends mail to my spambox email account, which I now have to check more often because that's where friend requests from my real-life friends show up, along with the "happy birthday" notes from people who think the Jan 1 1900 I gave FB is my real birthday. At least it doesn't get most of the messages about friends sending icons with cute little farm toys or new black helicopters for their MafiaWars characters yet.
The real trick here is how they build the communications and privacy models - how much data is open, how do they share it, what can you do with it - and how that affects what kinds of features you can build using it. You could build something like Livejournal on a pretty tight system with no central data storage, but it'd be harder to find your ex-girlfriend's cousin's third-grade-teacher's dog's picture and send it a cute icon of a fire hydrant. Or if you build a system that's really good at both of those, then you'll have tradeoffs in how much data you have to ship around, so your DSL connection is 98% full of encrypted packets for your friends' friends' friends' searches, and your query gets you a dialog box about "your posting may cost the net hundreds or thousands of dollars."
And that flexibility is important, not only for the kinds of marketing people who want to monetize everything, but also for the people who want to maintain the community and keep all of those users around and interested, as opposed to having them disappear like Friendster or Orkut users who had their fifteen minutes of fame and six months of friend invitations from cute guys in Brazil. Livejournal seems to be doing ok with it, but Facebook gets a lot of social involvement out of all of that Farmville and Mafia Wars stuff, and the question becomes how to facilitate the social networking effects of it without also the mass information-leakage.
Declan McCullagh's CNET article
It was an MBA class project to create a marketing campaign for a think tank to SELL to a telecom company on a $100 budget, and it wasn't even the winning entry for the class. So yeah, it's a Powerpoint that's just waiting to cause trouble.
So it's meta-Astroturf , not genuine Astroturf(tm) fake grass product as-seen-on-TV. And these meddling liberals have just burned it (without even filing an Environmental Impact Report about the effects of flame on Astroturf!)
Declan McCullagh's CNET article
It was an MBA class project to create a marketing campaign for a think tank to SELL to a telecom company on a $100 budget, and it wasn't even the winning entry for the class.
What I want is the opposite kind of pointing stick - something like a Wacom tablet that lets me use one hand to point at letters to use as a keyboard replacement. Back when I had a Palm Pilot, it could do that (or use Graffiti), but anything I've seen for the Wacom so far seems to use it as a mouse instead. Is there anything like that out there?
Thinkpad keyboards have cost me a couple of years of thumb joint pain, because they've an attractive nuisance encouraging me to turn my thumb in odd ways to use their left-hand alt keys.
And unfortunately I've had to mostly give up playing mountain dulcimer because the hand positioning that my teacher uses uses the left thumb a lot (there are tradeoffs between speed, chord options, and hand vs. arm motion) and there's a couple years worth of stuff to unlearn and relearn if I want to do cool stuff again.
Yeah, some chiropractors are quacks, and some of the theories behind chiropractic are bogus; obviously anybody who tells you they're going to cure the plague by adjusting your back should be avoided like, uhh, whatever...
However, chiropractors are specialists in back and neck pain, and these days they do get a good education in anatomy, muscles, tendons, etc. As a computer abuser, I've dealt with their profession over many years. Some are good, some aren't, one was also an MD (he did the chiro first, then got into "real medicine". I've had a chiropractor tell me that, sorry, he don't do shoulders, see an MD. My current chiropractor has been able to tell me a lot about what's going on inside my rotator cuff and does a lot of the same things that a physical therapist did when I had problems on the other shoulder a few years ago (on the other hand, she's not much help with non-carpal-tunnel hand problems other than advising general exercise, and will tell you that, but she's really good with elbow mechanics.)
One thing I've noticed over the years is that a lot of people in the chiropractic and physical therapy businesses got into it as a result of injuries that exposed them to the practice. A couple of them used crutches (I think it was the chiro who'd wrecked a motorcycle and the PT had wrecked a car, and hip replacement technology has gotten really good for old people but wasn't quite ready for young active people.) Another PT had a black eye when I first met her - she was a rugby player, so she was a frequent patient at her shop, at least on Mondays, as well as a practitioner.
We know North Korea hasn't released any very hot vaporware lately, so obviously they've perfected Cold Fusion!
It's obviously part of Microsoft's Plan for World Domination!
What? Did you think that picture of Gates with a monocle and white cat was just Photoshop?
What? You can't watch YouTube on your iPhone? We're not unreasonable. Here's the video version
Vim has about twice as many options as vi did back when I ran it on dumb terminals on a Vax 11/780. My laptop CPU is about 3000 times as fast (per core), and the 4GB RAM is 4x as large as the disk drives on my VAX, or 1000 times as large as the RAM. And yes, running it on top of WinXP is probably tougher than running on top of X Windows, but X ran just fine on a Sun3/60 or 25 MHz 386. (I suppose I should pay more attention and turn off random modes like +farsi, though :-)