Yes, I should mention that standard building practice in the area is wood-frame construction, stucco exterior. Because it's a temperate rainforest climate, molds and mildews grow well, and conversion to a greenhouse pretty much destroys the integrity of the wooden joists and beams.
Add to this that it's cheaper over here to rebuild than to strip and remodel (we have 5 year old homes that get demolished to put a new home in when someone buys the property here) and you can see why demolish is the way to go.
In Mission, BC it's got a bit worse than this... growing pot has become so profitable that people will rent a home, gut it, and turn the entire inside into a grow op. When these are finally detected and shut down, the house is a write-off and needs to be destroyed. Not good for the community, not good for the people owning the home.
Of course, if the US didn't have this war on drugs, Canadian Pot wouldn't be so valuable, and stuff like this wouldn't happen.
We're talking about asterisk here... they could just run windows inside a VM inside asterisk and load the skype client inside that... I'm sure asterisk has the capability to patch into such a beast documented somewhere inside its bowels.
AOL was not an ISP -- they were a nation-wide bulletin board. The ISP thing started as an afterthought, although it eventually consumed most of their company. Their claim to fame compared to other BBS systems such as CompuServe, FidoNet, EarthLink, etc. was that they had easy to access data, communications and discussion groups, aimed at the average person via a point and click interface.
AOL had secondary revenue streams through advertising and data mining (yes, if you signed up for AOL, you got a bunch of junk mail related to your AOL interests). Since AOL was mostly a walled garden, their data was also VERY HARD to copy. Until the advent of the World Wide Web and commercial Internet, it was also very costly to enter the market they were in, which is why they were one of the only players.
AOL eventually failed because people discovered that they could get far MORE from the Internet than they could from AOL, and it was almost as easy. The only way AOL could fight this was by opening portions of their walled garden to the Internet, which saved them in the short term but doomed them in the long term.
This is why AOL switched from the AOL program to an AOL-branded web browser that had embedded AOL-only content; it prevented the Internet at large from gathering their user data while at the same time allowing their customers to access Internet-only data.
So what we really need to do is find a parallel threat to Google that the Internet was to AOL. You're right that it's likely something like Facebook (although I think Facebook's lifespan is limited -- it will more likely be some other service that causes people to abandon Google).
Think about it this way: AOL = Walled Garden. Internet = Wilderness. AOL opens portal to Internet. AOL is overrun. Google creates method to tame Internet while capturing data for useful re-use. ??? = New Wilderness. Google opens portal to ???. Google is overrun, and loses data pseudo-monopoly.
Neither Facebook nor Apple could be ??? here; it has to be some other convergence technology. However, since Google has proven they're very adaptable, they might do a better job than AOL at leveraging the new convergance too.
Interesting... when you think about it, Google is positioning itself to be the new AOL -- the only difference being that its revenue is ad supported instead of subscription supported.
That's why emulators tend to come with keymap files; I've played Red Storm Rising in Frodo with a custom keymap, and it works just fine.
Of course, the play isn't the same as the original, so if your fingers still remember all the C64 hand-eye reflexes, they won't map to the new layout. But I think enough years have passed that building a new set of reflex actions shouldn't be too difficult.
Also, the temperature of your hands affects both typing speed and number of typos... and how awake you are does too.
And the worst thing is: if someone's keylogging your system, they'll have the pauses as well as the exact sequence you used, and can just replay it. So the system causes issues for legitimate users, while only stopping the most casual attempts at unauthorized access (for which a regular 12-16 character passphrase is usually enough in the first place).
The PC version is called (among other things) Best AntiVirus 2011, and doesn't come with the porn/bestiality/viagra popups; instead it actually messes with the registry and makes your computer somewhat unusable.
However, we can probably expect these popups to move to the Windows variants soon, if they prove to be a more effective "incentive" to register on the Mac.
The malware in question is written by a group that's been doing SEO poisoning (web pages and images) and email phishing to install Fake Antivirus on Windows PCs for years; they just added a check for OS X in their javascripts last month, sending a Mac Fake Antivirus installer instead of a Windows one.
An interesting thing is that this group put out a bounty a year ago for someone to write such software, and then everything went silent within a month -- I'm guessing they discovered it wasn't profitable enough at that point.
Now they seem to think it's profitable, and due to the vast number of people falling for the scam, I guess they're probably right. So something's changed in the Mac world in the last year that's made both the App Store and FakeAV apps appear to be worth the effort. Most likely it's an uptake in users who are comfortable doing what their computer tells them to do.
This is the problem with solar power, it's mostly home owners who are buying them and the systems cost so much it takes decades to break even (if purely doing it for cost reasons, not CO2).
So once a better technology comes along you have to junk the old tech and you may never break even.
Hello 1978, welcome to 2011 where panels pay for themselves within 4 years, have a lifespan of 20+ years, and are significantly cheaper to produce and use less-rare components.
Just remember that CS and CE are not really the same thing, and neither of them are the same as being a code jockey. CS students are trained to become architects; most of the comments on here are about QA and low-grade programming positions. I'm not quite sure where CE lines up in all that, but I'd guess somewhere in the middle.
Facebook isn't inherently evil and something that we should keep kids away from. They've got just as much chance getting nonced up on one of the kiddy branded sites like Mushi Monsters or Panfu. Funnily enough, they haven't been.
Facebook is no bigger an issue for a properly parented 8 year old than it is for an adult, sure... the problem is, it's a big privacy issue for everyone, and most people aren't aware of this.
Think of it this way... you start on Facebook at the age of 8... that means your online profiling starts at age 8. Anything your kid's Facebook friends say about them is recorded in perpetuity, including where they go, what they like, who they hang out with, what games they like to play, who their parents are, where they live, etc.
THIS is where the issue is; it doesn't really have to do with predatory "friends" at all -- it has to do with forward-looking privacy.
Think of Facebook as being the equivalent of a personal diary, but stored in a public locker somewhere with a big "Personal diary of so-and-so inside" sign posted on it... also listing an abstract of all the other people mentioned inside it. Sure, only certain people are currently authorized to open the locker. But the information is out there, and largely unsupervised, no matter how well supervised your children are.
I have glumly come to the conclusion that if I want something equivalent to or better than MacOS's Time Machine on Linux for doing time-based incremental backups, I'm going to have to write it myself, and it's going to have to rely on LVM's snapshotting mechanism to do a consistent backup until BTRFS is ready.
BackupPC has been around and mature for a whole lot longer than Time Machine, and has more flexibility, while allowing you to do exactly the same thing if you want. It's also cross-platform, and can use rsync over ssh, windows fileshares, or anything else you want to throw at it.
I used to run it for company backups, and pool all workstations into a single backup blob, but with each user able to manage their own "view" of their data; this means that if you're administering a single (or limited number of) drive image, you only have a single copy of each file sitting around. Plus, the system allows for rotated off-site backups as well as hourly incremental backups -- and you can set multiple overwrite rules if you want to.
I like the fact that such systems, similar to the current popular OSes, allow you to use sane defaults with minimal management, or to dig into the system to customize it to fit your exact needs, instead of having this dictated by the original developer.
The issue here is that Congress is in trouble if the banking industry collapses, therefore it is against their best interests to call for stiff penalties. However, if Apple collapses, they can just switch to Android phones, or Windows phones. No biggie. Apple realized this I'm sure, and so has shown that they're taking the issue seriously.
However, Google appears to be attempting to spin it: "We're like the banks... if you pursue this, the smartphone industry will collapse. If you don't, you'll get all these great features from great companies."
If the old publishers aren't willing to deal, that means it's using the Steam model. If it's not, then they're doing the worst of both worlds, which really doesn't sound like Google.
What's this "copy one by one" thing? What are these things you call "CD"s?
I buy my music online, and it automatically syncs from my main computer to all my other devices, either via wi-fi on demand, or while they're charging via USB. Not only that, if I purchase the music on one of my other devices while away from home, THAT music syncs back to the rest of them the next time I'm at home.
If I were a DJ, I could see a system like this being extremely useful, as you could have your entire set of lists, BPM tables, custom mixes, etc. available wherever you jockey, even if you have equipment failure, etc. For people just listening to music via low quality headphones/speakers, what's the point?
At this point, I'd just log into my home server and stream audio from home -- assuming I could remember my password. Google still doesn't bring anything extra to the table here.
Before they sue eyes, they'd better sue CBS, who has often mentioned Google as a place where people can go to download illegal content. They've even profited off of it via advertising.
I got a letter in the mail yesterday May 3rd advising me my info may have been hacked. Weird since I don't have a play station and have not played an online Sony game in over a decade (12 years maybe more) and then I canceled my subscription. Which brings me to a question why is information that old still being kept where it can be cracked?
Because they can:)
Honestly, it'd cost them more to purge it than it does for them to store it, and they have absolutely no incentive to throw out potentially useful information.
It's also useful to find a scapegoat that has proven to be culpable in the past and who cannot defend themselves. Since anonymous has no centralized leadership, there's nobody that can honestly say "it wasn't us!"
Wow, kind of a reminder of how much they've changed. These days it's, "You need an Apple technician to replace the battery / hard drive / casing / logo..."
Not much has changed; that was always Jobs's mantra -- it was just Woz's crew that prized hackability. That's why Jobs was in charge of sales. Hackability went out with the Lisa.
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Yes, I should mention that standard building practice in the area is wood-frame construction, stucco exterior. Because it's a temperate rainforest climate, molds and mildews grow well, and conversion to a greenhouse pretty much destroys the integrity of the wooden joists and beams.
Add to this that it's cheaper over here to rebuild than to strip and remodel (we have 5 year old homes that get demolished to put a new home in when someone buys the property here) and you can see why demolish is the way to go.
In Mission, BC it's got a bit worse than this... growing pot has become so profitable that people will rent a home, gut it, and turn the entire inside into a grow op. When these are finally detected and shut down, the house is a write-off and needs to be destroyed. Not good for the community, not good for the people owning the home.
Of course, if the US didn't have this war on drugs, Canadian Pot wouldn't be so valuable, and stuff like this wouldn't happen.
We're talking about asterisk here... they could just run windows inside a VM inside asterisk and load the skype client inside that... I'm sure asterisk has the capability to patch into such a beast documented somewhere inside its bowels.
Nah; the app cart is patented by Amazon.
AOL was not an ISP -- they were a nation-wide bulletin board. The ISP thing started as an afterthought, although it eventually consumed most of their company. Their claim to fame compared to other BBS systems such as CompuServe, FidoNet, EarthLink, etc. was that they had easy to access data, communications and discussion groups, aimed at the average person via a point and click interface.
AOL had secondary revenue streams through advertising and data mining (yes, if you signed up for AOL, you got a bunch of junk mail related to your AOL interests). Since AOL was mostly a walled garden, their data was also VERY HARD to copy. Until the advent of the World Wide Web and commercial Internet, it was also very costly to enter the market they were in, which is why they were one of the only players.
AOL eventually failed because people discovered that they could get far MORE from the Internet than they could from AOL, and it was almost as easy. The only way AOL could fight this was by opening portions of their walled garden to the Internet, which saved them in the short term but doomed them in the long term.
This is why AOL switched from the AOL program to an AOL-branded web browser that had embedded AOL-only content; it prevented the Internet at large from gathering their user data while at the same time allowing their customers to access Internet-only data.
So what we really need to do is find a parallel threat to Google that the Internet was to AOL. You're right that it's likely something like Facebook (although I think Facebook's lifespan is limited -- it will more likely be some other service that causes people to abandon Google).
Think about it this way: AOL = Walled Garden. Internet = Wilderness. AOL opens portal to Internet. AOL is overrun. Google creates method to tame Internet while capturing data for useful re-use. ??? = New Wilderness. Google opens portal to ???. Google is overrun, and loses data pseudo-monopoly.
Neither Facebook nor Apple could be ??? here; it has to be some other convergence technology. However, since Google has proven they're very adaptable, they might do a better job than AOL at leveraging the new convergance too.
Interesting... when you think about it, Google is positioning itself to be the new AOL -- the only difference being that its revenue is ad supported instead of subscription supported.
That's why emulators tend to come with keymap files; I've played Red Storm Rising in Frodo with a custom keymap, and it works just fine.
Of course, the play isn't the same as the original, so if your fingers still remember all the C64 hand-eye reflexes, they won't map to the new layout. But I think enough years have passed that building a new set of reflex actions shouldn't be too difficult.
Also, the temperature of your hands affects both typing speed and number of typos... and how awake you are does too.
And the worst thing is: if someone's keylogging your system, they'll have the pauses as well as the exact sequence you used, and can just replay it. So the system causes issues for legitimate users, while only stopping the most casual attempts at unauthorized access (for which a regular 12-16 character passphrase is usually enough in the first place).
The PC version is called (among other things) Best AntiVirus 2011, and doesn't come with the porn/bestiality/viagra popups; instead it actually messes with the registry and makes your computer somewhat unusable.
However, we can probably expect these popups to move to the Windows variants soon, if they prove to be a more effective "incentive" to register on the Mac.
The malware in question is written by a group that's been doing SEO poisoning (web pages and images) and email phishing to install Fake Antivirus on Windows PCs for years; they just added a check for OS X in their javascripts last month, sending a Mac Fake Antivirus installer instead of a Windows one.
An interesting thing is that this group put out a bounty a year ago for someone to write such software, and then everything went silent within a month -- I'm guessing they discovered it wasn't profitable enough at that point.
Now they seem to think it's profitable, and due to the vast number of people falling for the scam, I guess they're probably right. So something's changed in the Mac world in the last year that's made both the App Store and FakeAV apps appear to be worth the effort. Most likely it's an uptake in users who are comfortable doing what their computer tells them to do.
Might as well add automobiles to that list, as they tend to be the cause of more deaths.
This is the problem with solar power, it's mostly home owners who are buying them and the systems cost so much it takes decades to break even (if purely doing it for cost reasons, not CO2).
So once a better technology comes along you have to junk the old tech and you may never break even.
Hello 1978, welcome to 2011 where panels pay for themselves within 4 years, have a lifespan of 20+ years, and are significantly cheaper to produce and use less-rare components.
Seems to me that once they get a decent diode, these could be used as air cooling systems, with generated power as a positive side effect.
Just remember that CS and CE are not really the same thing, and neither of them are the same as being a code jockey. CS students are trained to become architects; most of the comments on here are about QA and low-grade programming positions. I'm not quite sure where CE lines up in all that, but I'd guess somewhere in the middle.
Facebook isn't inherently evil and something that we should keep kids away from. They've got just as much chance getting nonced up on one of the kiddy branded sites like Mushi Monsters or Panfu. Funnily enough, they haven't been.
Facebook is no bigger an issue for a properly parented 8 year old than it is for an adult, sure... the problem is, it's a big privacy issue for everyone, and most people aren't aware of this.
Think of it this way... you start on Facebook at the age of 8... that means your online profiling starts at age 8. Anything your kid's Facebook friends say about them is recorded in perpetuity, including where they go, what they like, who they hang out with, what games they like to play, who their parents are, where they live, etc.
THIS is where the issue is; it doesn't really have to do with predatory "friends" at all -- it has to do with forward-looking privacy.
Think of Facebook as being the equivalent of a personal diary, but stored in a public locker somewhere with a big "Personal diary of so-and-so inside" sign posted on it... also listing an abstract of all the other people mentioned inside it. Sure, only certain people are currently authorized to open the locker. But the information is out there, and largely unsupervised, no matter how well supervised your children are.
I have glumly come to the conclusion that if I want something equivalent to or better than MacOS's Time Machine on Linux for doing time-based incremental backups, I'm going to have to write it myself, and it's going to have to rely on LVM's snapshotting mechanism to do a consistent backup until BTRFS is ready.
BackupPC has been around and mature for a whole lot longer than Time Machine, and has more flexibility, while allowing you to do exactly the same thing if you want. It's also cross-platform, and can use rsync over ssh, windows fileshares, or anything else you want to throw at it.
I used to run it for company backups, and pool all workstations into a single backup blob, but with each user able to manage their own "view" of their data; this means that if you're administering a single (or limited number of) drive image, you only have a single copy of each file sitting around. Plus, the system allows for rotated off-site backups as well as hourly incremental backups -- and you can set multiple overwrite rules if you want to.
I like the fact that such systems, similar to the current popular OSes, allow you to use sane defaults with minimal management, or to dig into the system to customize it to fit your exact needs, instead of having this dictated by the original developer.
The issue here is that Congress is in trouble if the banking industry collapses, therefore it is against their best interests to call for stiff penalties. However, if Apple collapses, they can just switch to Android phones, or Windows phones. No biggie. Apple realized this I'm sure, and so has shown that they're taking the issue seriously.
However, Google appears to be attempting to spin it: "We're like the banks... if you pursue this, the smartphone industry will collapse. If you don't, you'll get all these great features from great companies."
If the old publishers aren't willing to deal, that means it's using the Steam model. If it's not, then they're doing the worst of both worlds, which really doesn't sound like Google.
...and here I thought "fruitless" referred to the fact that Apple was not being included in the discussions.
What's this "copy one by one" thing? What are these things you call "CD"s?
I buy my music online, and it automatically syncs from my main computer to all my other devices, either via wi-fi on demand, or while they're charging via USB. Not only that, if I purchase the music on one of my other devices while away from home, THAT music syncs back to the rest of them the next time I'm at home.
If I were a DJ, I could see a system like this being extremely useful, as you could have your entire set of lists, BPM tables, custom mixes, etc. available wherever you jockey, even if you have equipment failure, etc. For people just listening to music via low quality headphones/speakers, what's the point?
At this point, I'd just log into my home server and stream audio from home -- assuming I could remember my password. Google still doesn't bring anything extra to the table here.
Before they sue eyes, they'd better sue CBS, who has often mentioned Google as a place where people can go to download illegal content. They've even profited off of it via advertising.
I got a letter in the mail yesterday May 3rd advising me my info may have been hacked. Weird since I don't have a play station and have not played an online Sony game in over a decade (12 years maybe more) and then I canceled my subscription. Which brings me to a question why is information that old still being kept where it can be cracked?
Because they can :)
Honestly, it'd cost them more to purge it than it does for them to store it, and they have absolutely no incentive to throw out potentially useful information.
It's also useful to find a scapegoat that has proven to be culpable in the past and who cannot defend themselves. Since anonymous has no centralized leadership, there's nobody that can honestly say "it wasn't us!"
Wow, kind of a reminder of how much they've changed. These days it's, "You need an Apple technician to replace the battery / hard drive / casing / logo..."
Not much has changed; that was always Jobs's mantra -- it was just Woz's crew that prized hackability. That's why Jobs was in charge of sales. Hackability went out with the Lisa.