t and the sorry state of always unencrypted email all the time, by default
Don't all the non-Microsoft email transfer agents (you know, sendmail, postfix, qmail, etc.) default to StartTLS over ESMTP at this point? I mean, RFC3207 is over a decade old now! Certainly the major distros I've used are shipping their MTAs that way, and auto-generate self-signed certs (which are perfectly useable for email) at install time.
That doesn't prevent [insert adversary here] from MITM'ing StartTLS/ESMTP connections, since the MTA will happily connect to anything with a self-signed cert (and certificate authorities are not necessarily trustworthy either). Sure, Sendmail will log whether certificates are valid or not, but SSL/TLS are of limited usefulness against a determined attacker, in email as much as on the web.
I'm on a prepaid TMo plan, and the voice quality is quite good when calling either another T-Mobile customer or a landline. After years of crap voice quality on AT&T via Tracfone, T-Mobile is like a breath of fresh air.
In general, I'm happy with the service when I'm in the Chicago area, but once I get out of the metro area, there are a couple of big problems: first, a lot of their rural/small-city coverage is still EDGE or even GPRS (guys, it's 2013, GPRS shouldn't even be a thing anymore), and there are some big holes in their coverage. In certain areas, I can roam onto AT&T or other GSM-based regional carriers, though data roaming is unavailable on prepaid and severely limited on postpaid accounts. There are other areas, though (Pana, IL for instance), where no roaming is allowed at all and my phone gets no service.
Forget about audio streaming when you're out of their HSPA+/LTE footprint.
IMO, the T60 and T61 were the last real ThinkPads. Fortunately, refurbs can be had for cheap.
They're not perfect, though. In particular, they have a real problem getting along with Intel SSDs (30-second freezeups on Windows 7 due to power management issues), and if you want 3 Gbps SATA instead of 1.5, you need to flash a hacked BIOS. Once I put a Samsung SSD in, the freezeups went away, and I put the Intel drive in my desktop.
Still, they're built like tanks, and they have that all-important TrackPoint.
There already are levels to the alert system. I wasted no time turning off Amber alerts after receiving one, but I'm leaving the the other ones activated for now. I think it's a bit stupid to use the EBS tone for Amber alerts, in any case; it should be reserved for things like severe weather, zombie apocalypse, etc. If a tornado is heading for my area at 2 AM, I want to know about it.
There's a "Presidential alert" that can't be disabled, though. Hopefully, it won't ever be used (because it's likely that it will mean that World War III has started).
I think that's really more of a GNOME 3 complaint than a Fedora complaint. I've just spun up a Debian Wheezy install on my main system, since I'm fleeing Ubuntu (stuck with 10.04 LTS until the desktop updates stopped coming). I've been trying to like GNOME 3, but I'm about ready to shitcan it. I'm using the "classic" mode at the moment (I found that I flat-out hated the new, not-so-improved interface), but even in classic mode there's still a whole lot of dumbing-down that I find simply infuriating.
Example: I prefer to NOT have my screen blank on idle, since that plays hell with my KVM switch, and I prefer to turn off the monitor when I decide to, not when the computer thinks I should. When GNOME 3 (either Classic or Fisher-Price) goes into screen blanking when the KVM switch is switched to a different system, it will come back in 640x480 mode, this on a 1920x1200 monitor. Unfortunately, the GNOME 3 crew has decided that "Never" is not a valid setting for screen blanking, which means I had to 1) add a script to/etc/Xsession.d/ that runs xset -dpms and then run dconf-editor, navigate to org.gnome.desktop.screensaver, and shut off the idle-activation-enabled toggle. WTF? I shouldn't have to go through such gyrations just to turn of the damned screen blanking.
I've been running Cinnamon elsewhere, and that's pretty good (but a bit rough around the edges). I'm debating between MATE, Cinnamon, or XFCE for this Debian box. GNOME has jumped so many sharks that it's running out of sharks to jump.
The first computer I actually used was a PDP-11/34 running RSTS/E at my high school. A few years back, I decided to throw SIMH on one of my PCs and bring up my very own RSTS system. I laughed my ass off when I discovered RSTS wasn't Y2K compliant, since my high school CS teacher (in 1980!) was warning about the Year 2000 issue even then. I wound up calling the RSTS system "sgtpepper" since I set its clock back exactly 20 years.
SIMH is pretty amazing - but the hilarious thing is that a modern CPU emulates the hardware much faster than the actual machine. I could throw SIMH onto any recent Android phone and run a faster RSTS system with more storage in my pocket than that/34 which filled a full-height rack and had two washing-machine-sized hard drives. Of course, that would really only be worth it for the hack value, not for anything useful, but it would be a fun project for a rainy day.
Aside from the trust issues mentioned elsewhere, the other thing I don't like about this is that it'll flood the neighborhood with even more 2.4 GHz clutter.
5 GHz is not a panacea; it's astonishingly poor at penetrating walls, to the point that I treat my 5 GHz AP as only useful in the same room.
For all the talk about "ZOMG the US government/New World Order/Illuminati is going to take our moneez!" in this thread, I'm surprised there's been absolutely no mention of what Liberty Reserve was often used for: the crimeware trade.
Head over to Krebs on Security for a better idea of why shutting down Liberty Reserve is a Good Thing.
Not that I have anything personal against electric cars - much to the contrary, despite the fact that battery production releases insane amounts of pollution (thereby effectively negating the "green" effect of electrics vs internal combustion)
[citation needed] [not to mention the insane amount of pollution involved in mining and refining petroleum, much less burning it]
However, considering the lack of supporting infrastructure, abysmal battery life, and crazy-huge charging times, I just don't see them being adopted en masse anytime soon, short of an unlikely, major technological breakthrough.
Most of the time, you're going to be charging it at home, overnight. For that, charging stations are unnecessary if you're staying in-range.
An eight-year warranty isn't "abysmal battery life." I'll agree with the lack of charging infrastructure for long trips (the Tesla Supercharger stations are nowhere to be found in the Midwest, for instance), but even a Nissan Leaf would handle 100% of my daily routine driving. It's the non-routine long trips that kill the deal for me (I have a Leaf budget, not a Tesla budget). For now, that means I drive a Honda Fit instead. Once the Fit is paid off, depending on gas prices, I'll crunch the numbers and see if a Leaf would work out as a daily driver, keeping the Honda for the long trips.
The Supercharger setup comes very close to solving the long-trip problem, though. When you have 200+ miles of electric range and get get 150 more miles for half an hour at a Supercharger (with time to stretch your legs, get a snack, etc.), it's a lot less of a problem.
If I were in the market for a high-end luxury car, the Model S would be at the top of my list.
Does that include a discount for the spent batteries (useful for recycling), or is that the price of a new battery pack without turning in an existing one?
The multifunction display in the Honda Fit has a bar graph for instantaneous MPG, and the display can be switched to show average MPG since the last trip odometer reset.
The EPA ratings are 27 city, 33 highway for a 2010 with manual transmission. I get vastly better mileage with mine - about 36 in average driving, 37-38 in 70-75 MPH freeway driving, and 40-43 at 55-60 MPH country blacktop speeds. I don't go crazy with hypermiling, and I tend to accelerate briskly but not pedal-to-the-floor. The key is to keep a light touch on the gas at speed, and I also tend not to race up to red lights. Also, I don't have the option of using cruise, since the 2010 base model doesn't have cruise control.
The effect of lots of stop-and-go driving can be readily seen on the display, especially early in a tankful (I reset the trip meter at each fill-up).
One time when I went in for scheduled maintenance, the service guy saw 42 on the average MPG display, and told me I was getting better mileage than a Civic Hybrid.
I have a Galaxy S Relay, and it's too bad the phone is already discontinued, because I love having the slide-out keyboard. I wouldn't mind a bit bigger screen or a higher-resolution camera, but it's smooth and responsive, and there's no substitute for a real keyboard.
I wouldn't mind seeing an S4 with a slide-out, but that's not bloody likely. The lack of a physical keyboard is the only thing that makes me think twice about trading up.
That's at least part of the story. Note how the rare attempts at selling prebuilt Linux PCs, such as the early netbooks, have tended to have oddball custom Linux distros (Linpus? WTF?) instead of, let's say, Debian, Ubuntu, or even a RHEL clone. My cynical side says that this was done on purpose as a way of discrediting Linux in the eyes of the general population.
A more recent thing that doesn't help matters is the new X11 vs. Wayland vs. Mir kerfluffle. Considering how often I use X11 forwarding over SSH, I'm not looking forward to Wayland or Mir.
Both good and bad: the multitude of desktop environments. As unhappy as I am with GNOME 3 and Unity, at least there are others I can fall back on. Still, I think that Ubuntu's default of sending local search results to Amazon by default is toxic.
Version 5000 is used for community ZFS implementations that have feature flags (Illumos, BSD, and Linux).
If you're talking about Solaris, the current version is 34; any version past 28 comes after Oracle closed off Solaris. Note that beyond version 28, the community and Oracle ZFS pools are not interoperable.
If you're from someplace that actually has diplomatic relations with them, it might be easier. Then there's this guy, who went with a friend via the Russian border (normally off-limits to Western tourists), spent 36 hours in North Korea without a guide, and somehow managed to stay out of jail: http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/ (long travelogue including journey across Russia)
They still have their palms out if you want to encode video for public consumption. It isn't about screwing the consumer so much as preventing the consumer from becoming a producer.
If the iThings had some sort of switch you could set with a suitable "at your own risk warning" to jailbreak it, I'd buy one in a heartbeat. Without such a thing, they go on my "no way, no how" list.
Then again, I don't even run an Android phone, simply because mobile data amounts to highway robbery (or else you have to settle for crappy coverage). If the cell companies are going to cram expensive data plans when most places I'd actually need data have Wi-Fi, then screw 'em.
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Don't all the non-Microsoft email transfer agents (you know, sendmail, postfix, qmail, etc.) default to StartTLS over ESMTP at this point? I mean, RFC3207 is over a decade old now! Certainly the major distros I've used are shipping their MTAs that way, and auto-generate self-signed certs (which are perfectly useable for email) at install time.
That doesn't prevent [insert adversary here] from MITM'ing StartTLS/ESMTP connections, since the MTA will happily connect to anything with a self-signed cert (and certificate authorities are not necessarily trustworthy either). Sure, Sendmail will log whether certificates are valid or not, but SSL/TLS are of limited usefulness against a determined attacker, in email as much as on the web.
How many Android handsets come with USB debugging enabled by default?
I'm on a prepaid TMo plan, and the voice quality is quite good when calling either another T-Mobile customer or a landline. After years of crap voice quality on AT&T via Tracfone, T-Mobile is like a breath of fresh air.
In general, I'm happy with the service when I'm in the Chicago area, but once I get out of the metro area, there are a couple of big problems: first, a lot of their rural/small-city coverage is still EDGE or even GPRS (guys, it's 2013, GPRS shouldn't even be a thing anymore), and there are some big holes in their coverage. In certain areas, I can roam onto AT&T or other GSM-based regional carriers, though data roaming is unavailable on prepaid and severely limited on postpaid accounts. There are other areas, though (Pana, IL for instance), where no roaming is allowed at all and my phone gets no service.
Forget about audio streaming when you're out of their HSPA+/LTE footprint.
IMO, the T60 and T61 were the last real ThinkPads. Fortunately, refurbs can be had for cheap.
They're not perfect, though. In particular, they have a real problem getting along with Intel SSDs (30-second freezeups on Windows 7 due to power management issues), and if you want 3 Gbps SATA instead of 1.5, you need to flash a hacked BIOS. Once I put a Samsung SSD in, the freezeups went away, and I put the Intel drive in my desktop.
Still, they're built like tanks, and they have that all-important TrackPoint.
So when do we see real-life "Whiz Mobile" phones available in stores?
There already are levels to the alert system. I wasted no time turning off Amber alerts after receiving one, but I'm leaving the the other ones activated for now. I think it's a bit stupid to use the EBS tone for Amber alerts, in any case; it should be reserved for things like severe weather, zombie apocalypse, etc. If a tornado is heading for my area at 2 AM, I want to know about it.
There's a "Presidential alert" that can't be disabled, though. Hopefully, it won't ever be used (because it's likely that it will mean that World War III has started).
I think that's really more of a GNOME 3 complaint than a Fedora complaint. I've just spun up a Debian Wheezy install on my main system, since I'm fleeing Ubuntu (stuck with 10.04 LTS until the desktop updates stopped coming). I've been trying to like GNOME 3, but I'm about ready to shitcan it. I'm using the "classic" mode at the moment (I found that I flat-out hated the new, not-so-improved interface), but even in classic mode there's still a whole lot of dumbing-down that I find simply infuriating.
Example: I prefer to NOT have my screen blank on idle, since that plays hell with my KVM switch, and I prefer to turn off the monitor when I decide to, not when the computer thinks I should. When GNOME 3 (either Classic or Fisher-Price) goes into screen blanking when the KVM switch is switched to a different system, it will come back in 640x480 mode, this on a 1920x1200 monitor. Unfortunately, the GNOME 3 crew has decided that "Never" is not a valid setting for screen blanking, which means I had to 1) add a script to /etc/Xsession.d/ that runs xset -dpms and then run dconf-editor, navigate to org.gnome.desktop.screensaver, and shut off the idle-activation-enabled toggle. WTF? I shouldn't have to go through such gyrations just to turn of the damned screen blanking.
I've been running Cinnamon elsewhere, and that's pretty good (but a bit rough around the edges). I'm debating between MATE, Cinnamon, or XFCE for this Debian box. GNOME has jumped so many sharks that it's running out of sharks to jump.
The first computer I actually used was a PDP-11/34 running RSTS/E at my high school. A few years back, I decided to throw SIMH on one of my PCs and bring up my very own RSTS system. I laughed my ass off when I discovered RSTS wasn't Y2K compliant, since my high school CS teacher (in 1980!) was warning about the Year 2000 issue even then. I wound up calling the RSTS system "sgtpepper" since I set its clock back exactly 20 years.
SIMH is pretty amazing - but the hilarious thing is that a modern CPU emulates the hardware much faster than the actual machine. I could throw SIMH onto any recent Android phone and run a faster RSTS system with more storage in my pocket than that /34 which filled a full-height rack and had two washing-machine-sized hard drives. Of course, that would really only be worth it for the hack value, not for anything useful, but it would be a fun project for a rainy day.
Aside from the trust issues mentioned elsewhere, the other thing I don't like about this is that it'll flood the neighborhood with even more 2.4 GHz clutter.
5 GHz is not a panacea; it's astonishingly poor at penetrating walls, to the point that I treat my 5 GHz AP as only useful in the same room.
For all the talk about "ZOMG the US government/New World Order/Illuminati is going to take our moneez!" in this thread, I'm surprised there's been absolutely no mention of what Liberty Reserve was often used for: the crimeware trade.
Head over to Krebs on Security for a better idea of why shutting down Liberty Reserve is a Good Thing.
Not that I have anything personal against electric cars - much to the contrary, despite the fact that battery production releases insane amounts of pollution (thereby effectively negating the "green" effect of electrics vs internal combustion)
[citation needed] [not to mention the insane amount of pollution involved in mining and refining petroleum, much less burning it]
However, considering the lack of supporting infrastructure, abysmal battery life, and crazy-huge charging times, I just don't see them being adopted en masse anytime soon, short of an unlikely, major technological breakthrough.
Most of the time, you're going to be charging it at home, overnight. For that, charging stations are unnecessary if you're staying in-range.
An eight-year warranty isn't "abysmal battery life." I'll agree with the lack of charging infrastructure for long trips (the Tesla Supercharger stations are nowhere to be found in the Midwest, for instance), but even a Nissan Leaf would handle 100% of my daily routine driving. It's the non-routine long trips that kill the deal for me (I have a Leaf budget, not a Tesla budget). For now, that means I drive a Honda Fit instead. Once the Fit is paid off, depending on gas prices, I'll crunch the numbers and see if a Leaf would work out as a daily driver, keeping the Honda for the long trips.
The Supercharger setup comes very close to solving the long-trip problem, though. When you have 200+ miles of electric range and get get 150 more miles for half an hour at a Supercharger (with time to stretch your legs, get a snack, etc.), it's a lot less of a problem.
If I were in the market for a high-end luxury car, the Model S would be at the top of my list.
Does that include a discount for the spent batteries (useful for recycling), or is that the price of a new battery pack without turning in an existing one?
The multifunction display in the Honda Fit has a bar graph for instantaneous MPG, and the display can be switched to show average MPG since the last trip odometer reset.
The EPA ratings are 27 city, 33 highway for a 2010 with manual transmission. I get vastly better mileage with mine - about 36 in average driving, 37-38 in 70-75 MPH freeway driving, and 40-43 at 55-60 MPH country blacktop speeds. I don't go crazy with hypermiling, and I tend to accelerate briskly but not pedal-to-the-floor. The key is to keep a light touch on the gas at speed, and I also tend not to race up to red lights. Also, I don't have the option of using cruise, since the 2010 base model doesn't have cruise control.
The effect of lots of stop-and-go driving can be readily seen on the display, especially early in a tankful (I reset the trip meter at each fill-up).
One time when I went in for scheduled maintenance, the service guy saw 42 on the average MPG display, and told me I was getting better mileage than a Civic Hybrid.
In British usage, gas is LPG (propane).
I have a Galaxy S Relay, and it's too bad the phone is already discontinued, because I love having the slide-out keyboard. I wouldn't mind a bit bigger screen or a higher-resolution camera, but it's smooth and responsive, and there's no substitute for a real keyboard.
I wouldn't mind seeing an S4 with a slide-out, but that's not bloody likely. The lack of a physical keyboard is the only thing that makes me think twice about trading up.
True, but then again, Oracle has closed off access to MySQL test cases, and let's not forget what they did to OpenSolaris.
That's at least part of the story. Note how the rare attempts at selling prebuilt Linux PCs, such as the early netbooks, have tended to have oddball custom Linux distros (Linpus? WTF?) instead of, let's say, Debian, Ubuntu, or even a RHEL clone. My cynical side says that this was done on purpose as a way of discrediting Linux in the eyes of the general population.
A more recent thing that doesn't help matters is the new X11 vs. Wayland vs. Mir kerfluffle. Considering how often I use X11 forwarding over SSH, I'm not looking forward to Wayland or Mir.
Both good and bad: the multitude of desktop environments. As unhappy as I am with GNOME 3 and Unity, at least there are others I can fall back on. Still, I think that Ubuntu's default of sending local search results to Amazon by default is toxic.
Version 5000 is used for community ZFS implementations that have feature flags (Illumos, BSD, and Linux).
If you're talking about Solaris, the current version is 34; any version past 28 comes after Oracle closed off Solaris. Note that beyond version 28, the community and Oracle ZFS pools are not interoperable.
Obsolete by now, but still a good window into the weirdness of North Korea: http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-to-north-korea-1-of-3 (warning: autoplay video)
If you're from someplace that actually has diplomatic relations with them, it might be easier. Then there's this guy, who went with a friend via the Russian border (normally off-limits to Western tourists), spent 36 hours in North Korea without a guide, and somehow managed to stay out of jail: http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/ (long travelogue including journey across Russia)
They still have their palms out if you want to encode video for public consumption. It isn't about screwing the consumer so much as preventing the consumer from becoming a producer.
The old Zenith TV remotes used ultrasonic signals to activate TV functions. There's nothing new here other than "on a computer."
...but I can't help but think that such an effect would be intentional. But they have the money, er, "protected speech," to push this through.
Is any PDF plugin secure? Certainly there have been a hell of a lot of exploits targeted at Adobe Reader over the years...
I just recently upgraded to this monitor, and I love it. Adjustable height, can be rotated to portrait mode, LED backlit.
I love having 1920x1200 - those extra vertical pixels are worth the extra price vs. the ubiquitous 1920x1080 screens.
If the iThings had some sort of switch you could set with a suitable "at your own risk warning" to jailbreak it, I'd buy one in a heartbeat. Without such a thing, they go on my "no way, no how" list.
Then again, I don't even run an Android phone, simply because mobile data amounts to highway robbery (or else you have to settle for crappy coverage). If the cell companies are going to cram expensive data plans when most places I'd actually need data have Wi-Fi, then screw 'em.