First of all, the MITM issue will always exist. Nobody is prevented from setting up their own hotspot named Starbcuks, getting a certificate for it and sniffing whatever passes.
The first issue is, how are we managing the certificates and that is the same problem with using SSL certificates for 'identity' verification (IT'S NOT PEOPLE). How can we be sure the CA hasn't revoked the certificate if we can't connect to anything? Does it mean we have to pay big bucks for each hotspot to a Verisign-type place so we can assure our customers? If we want to roll our own, will clients be prevented or otherwise inconvenienced or scared away from connecting? When we have to start trusting CA's, how trustworthy are they to begin with and how trustworthy should they be? How can I trust any certificate or "open" wireless network being presented to me if I haven't been communicated the certificate or a password beforehand?
The second issue is, how are we sure any of the routers downstream of our connection are trustworthy? This will give people a false sense of security and will be abused. The best way to authenticate is still WPA2-Enterprise even for public networks if you want it to be secured, just give individualized tokens. Otherwise, leave the connection open and clients should be responsible for their own end-to-end encryption.
Why don't you just do it all in HTML? I created a 'web app' in a single HTML file (Requirements were interactive, universal (mobile, desktop, linux, mac, windows) offline access to a database and sending people a directory structure was just unacceptable).
Before that it was an Excel file but then the iPhone came along and Mac's were always left out and Office 2010 eventually ate the VBScript.
I created the full structure and intelligence to fetch the repetitive database stuff in PHP. Then to export it, the CSS was included, the JavaScript serialized and included, images were loaded and encoded in base64 and included and eventually excessive white spaces stripped. A 5MB HTML page that could be seen anywhere including images. I think IE(6) has a problem with it but then what doesn't it have a problem with.
Beyond the shiny and Microsoft phasing out support for it, what is new in Windows 7 that XP doesn't have. I mean, OS/2 was supported until a couple of years ago and still did what we wanted it to do.
Microsoft had promised us WinFS and a host of other things that originally would've made it into XP but now with 8 on the way still has not even a beta implementation. In the mean time much better, faster and smarter file systems have come (ZFS) and gone (Reiser).
They were called 'sprites' and required quite some work to have a lot of detail and a lot of detail required a lot of power to process even for simple modifications like lifting an arm and interpolating everything in between. In 3D space we call them voxels and recently some GPGPU's can work quite fast with them.
However on a standard (16-core, 8GB) computer rendering and tracing the collision, activation and interaction of specific voxels onto other voxels for about 5 movies of 100s (2048x2048) takes about 2 weeks of user interaction and 2 days of rendering. Yes, this is for scientific purposes where you do want that type of detail but imagine making even the simplest humanoid interpretation in a game (even just an outer shell) where specific voxels can be modified by incoming clusters of voxels (eg. a bullet) - this would require months of programmer and designer work if it can even be rendered in real time.
For the 2010 fiscal year, the president's base budget of the Department of spending on "overseas contingency operations" $663.8 billion. Overall the budget has over 1.1 trillion dollars set aside for direct military spending not to talk about the indirect costs and during the republican rule this was 1.6 trillion dollars.
The US spends roughly 5% of GDP, 50% of tax revenue on military spending, roughly 6x the amount that a militaristic country like China spends. Off course that is what the tea baggers want: less spending but don't cut any of the services and increase military spending so we can feel safe.
Did you know the US still has operations and bases in Germany and other places in Europe to keep the Nazi's from taking over?
You seriously have no idea about the technical aspects of this do you. YOU may not see a need or want for it as you only seem to need Fox News and affiliated blogging sites but I see a serious need beyond my current capacity.
I am CONTINUOUSLY using over 5Mbps in streaming services and downloads already and I regularly fill my 10Mbps cap and then I don't even have kids that use computers yet. I pay over $150 for this privilege, I can upgrade to a 15Mbps burst for another $50 but that is it before I need to go to a business level for roughly double that price tag.
Companies in my area doing research, downloading large data sets need serious bandwidth beyond the 20-30Mbps available to them. 100Mbps is a minimum in this new world and having it available at the current rates ($100/month) would simply make it possible for more applications to be developed more economically.
4G as currently implemented in the US is a joke. The EU has faster 3G than the fastest 4G. We have it available here too (Clearwire) but 1Mbps tops and 300ms ping time is unacceptable and as soon as you move beyond the city limits it becomes unavailable.
Because the average Internet connection in the US (and most cities including this one) is 3Mbps, not 15. Also to spur innovation and economy (as online business is booming, except in the US where it's less time consuming to DRIVE in my government sponsored car to RedBox than streaming it).
Loans get payed back with interest, no worries about a mere 100B when at least 10x that amount gets spent yearly on unnecessary military campaigns and another identical amount trying to keep old people alive that can't afford a private insurance as there is no public health care option.
As long as people pay for it, why bother? There are lower cost options available that give out the same paper. If you really want a special name on top, you should pay for it.
Either way this is a good initiative I think as I live in an area with a couple of Universities and Colleges. This won't only help the colleges but also the surrounding living areas and businesses and in return attract more people that have kids and need education.
Trust me, those contracting agencies will just hire the same person the company (or Fed) would've hired. The only benefit is that management can now claim the contractor did it and wash their hands of any blame. The contractor (or at worst, the contracting company) gets fired and another one gets hired with the same or even less qualifications, rinse and repeat.
The only things it does circumvent is unionization (which is the biggest problem in other departments among large companies and government). That's one thing you don't want, a unionized IT staff. IT people past help desk and management jobs (the actual sysadmins, network engineers) are more like doctor's - you want them to be responsible and be able to get and take the blame and not be shielded.
What I care about is MTTDL (Mean Time to Data Loss) of a complete system. Hard drives are unreliable as is any component in your computer. That's why you should make at the very least every individual component your data path follows double or triple redundant. This is easily accomplished these days, ZFS, RAID6 etc. Make sure you don't just rely on the mechanical parts of your system to keep your data safe.
What else you want to know is undetected data corruption. Hard disks are very bad at keeping data, SSD's may wear out too (as in the end there is still a physical/mechanical process) but you might be able to read the cells even if you can't write to it. On average hard disks will give an uncorrected error every 12TB read.
Besides that, SSD's give way more IOPS than any hard drive available (even the 15k RPM ones). So you can keep the system's MTTDL much lower as you have less parts and for the same price you could even invest more in redundancy (double mirror an SSD) instead of a set of RAID10's.
Usually those problems result in significant performance problems and THAT is why people notice and investigate. In most systems there is no reporting back to the end-user or the administrator and the SMART status has to be read with a special tool anyway.
All of the tech world was crying out over the introduction of such filters that were going to be used for child porn but overextended to include at first piracy and then other speech that was less acceptable and then on to speech that is currently free.
Off course the powers-that-be had this intention all along and the opposers vilified as child pornographers. Now it's too late, sites will be arbitrarily added and won't be able to removed fully ever again.
I don't mind paying money for games but the big studio's retail $50/game is a bit much unless it's a really good thing. I do pay for second hand titles if it's under $20. Given you get 5 games I usually end up forking $50 or more for these bundles.
After sleep mode the average Mac (SSD or not) takes 1 sec to come out of sleep, about 1s out of hibernation. IF (does anyone still turn off their laptop?) you turn off or reboot you get to a login prompt in about 16s. Even on non-SSD machines this is about similar, Snow Leopard and Lion use compressed directories to store much of the system and let the (ultrafast) memory and CPU handle the uncompressing while using less (ultraslow) hard disk bandwidth and seek time. I guess if you can get a compressed EXT4 or ZFS to boot Ubuntu off it would be at least 30-50% faster.
If I see "cloud computing" on anyone's resume I cringe. What part of the 'cloud' are you working on? Virtualization software, virtualization configuration, switches, networking, hardware, server assembly line, racking, wiring, architecture, a specific virtual server, HVAC, weather forecasting, producing rain? A cloud is (to me) one or more datacenters filled with a monoculture of servers.
Anyway. The benefit is that the GUI does a lot of the menial work (eg. Apache site configuration, disk shares, mail server or user provisioning), Open Directory integration with Mac, nice hardware/software combination (including all the bells and whistles) and top shelf support. Red Hat has really good support as well but HP/Dell support lacks unless you fork over the big bucks. Dell will actually retard claims if you run on something they don't directly recognize, sell or support (such as Scientific Linux) or use it for things the first line support thought was not fit for the hardware you bought (such as running a cluster).
If you're in the scientific field, XGrid is nice and easy, in schools or labs NetBoot (and using DeployStudio, you can get free non-Apple deployments as well) is one of those nice things and for small offices especially you can get a full server including a full groupware solution with unlimited seats for the cost of a single no-hardware Windows Server license.
I don't know if your career path was good but personally I wouldn't choose one that involves a buzzword.
5B is a lot of money to waste if there is nothing to show. Was it spent on Microsoft licensing? Probably a lot of it was given with such ties and 5B is easy to spend on licensing stuff. Was it spent on 'investigating' what needs to be changed? Probably as well as some administrator buildings could've been filled with random people looking for stuff to do but never producing any results.
What we need is for that type of money to be spent in an open fashion on stuff that is actually productive. Spending $5B over 100,000 schools in 10 years is useless. Give $1B to a single school or school district to invest in better buildings, infrastructure and reform it's set of teacher's, learn from it and use what you have learned as you go along and then give the next school $1B to do the same.
Beyond basic configuration, real Mac OS X sysadmins don't use the GUI's. The things the author gripes about (QTSS, MySQL, NFS) were never really expansive in the GUI tools beyond "enable networking" or "run # processes" or "set this service to run on port 8000". QTSS has been replaced, not removed and no longer requires server involvement beyond a file share. MySQL is replaced by PostgreSQL and as said before, beyond "enable networking" really had never any GUI admin tools thus we were still going to command line or phpMyAdmin. MySQL is still there by the way, not removed entirely. NFS same thing, shares were never done in the "NFS" tab, they were done in the "Sharing" tab together with AFP and SMB.
SMB as a PDC/BDC is maybe a slight loss in small environments but thanks to the licensing issues it was stuck on 2 and never could've made it bundled in Mac OS X to 3 (and Windows 7 support) as GPLv3 prevents the proprietary ties to the configuration subsystem. There is documentation available however on how to run Samba 3 (and binary packages as well) on Mac OS X Server and run it as a PDC/BDC against LDAP (which Open Directory is), it just won't be integrated.
I like that XSAN is now included for free. Great if you want to build a large mail or Apache or any type of cluster and very simple to set up. Also the Profiles addition will be a boon in many (especially the more mobile) environments. A lot of that could be done already (provisioning) in Open Directory (using MCX) but not many users like to be bothered with locking down their environment.
Look up their posts on YouTube. They clearly explains the many misconceptions creationists have with evolution such as macroevolution, abiogenesis, faith, literal interpretation of scripture and . Also the misconceptions armchair evolutionists have with evolution such as microevolution, variances, apologetics (stemming out of lack of knowledge on the subject, not lack of evidence for evolution), abiogenesis and evolution as an 'atheist' belief (being an atheist or a theist/deist doesn't relate to evolution).
If the system is 'embarrassingly parallel' and simple then the GPU would be a better use case. GPU's typically have a lot (200-400) cores that are optimized for embarrassingly simple calculations. Sure you could render everything on a CPU these days, simpler games could even run with an old school SVGA (simple frame buffer) card and let all the graphics be handled by the CPU as used to be the case in the 90's and is evidenced by the 'game emulators in JavaScript' we've been seeing lately but GPU's are usually fairly unused except for the ultramodern 3D shooters which also tax a CPU pretty hard.
We don't need government involvement in apps, websites or other sources that are simply informative in purpose. If you getting close to medical advice the creators should just tell you: this is not medical advice, if in doubt contact your doctor, do not use for diagnosis etc. If people are stupid and use it for it, why not, some believe and practice lot of old wive tales about medical things, some even believe in homeopathy, faith healing etc., government involvement over those things is simply encroaching on our rights.
The problem is not that the password is stored on the device, that is a problem occurring regardless of the device. The problem is that the program stores the password in an open, unauthenticated data store that other programs can access and is not encrypted. You can create your own encrypted container and store passwords in it (like Firefox stores passwords internally) or rely on a system-wide per-program encrypted container (like Mac OS X Keychain). Android just uses an unencrypted SQLite database with hardly any access controls. Most Android devices are also not encrypted (as compared to most Blackberries and iOS devices) since the manufacturers leave that 'option' to the 'business-class' devices like the Motorola Droid Pro.
And have those plans ever been exercised? There was a huge scare with the anthrax a couple of years ago which kinda fizzled as the perpetrator(s) didn't have the means or need to distribute or the Asian/Mexican bird/swine flu on larger scales showed that there is simply no ACTUAL response to those type of attacks that is either viable or affordable.
The CDC, FDA etc. response plans to protect anyone but the president and a handful of rich people are a running joke and waiting on a government agency to respond to any emergency for the rest of the population is simply asking for failure (Katrina, BP,...).
I trust a well-designed and administered network over any government agency. What people (rephrase that: management) want is somebody to secure, update and maintain their computers for free (or paid for by somebody else) and the government dealings in recent years with the car manufacturers and banks is an excellent example of how to distribute the exuberant cost tags of a couple of companies and the mistakes in management to all citizens without any repercussions.
Apple has pretty good enterprise tools, directory support, image deployment. What I have noticed in my organization is that Windows admins simply don't want to investigate. We have an Apple rep (engineer) that gives free classes on anything we want and still the Windows admins complain Lion needs a 3rd party (expensive) full disk encryption, special programs to integrate with Active Directory and can't be imaged.
We're back to Solaris Express which seems to be maintained by Oracle and spinoff Nexenta which also has a free version.
ZFS does very well but it is a file system, not an application nor a distributed or networked file system (although it can be set up that way). I know applications that run end-to-end data integrity on top of ZFS because ZFS can maintain local integrity while the application keeps global integrity.
Usually those applications are very slow to store, retrieve and repair data but sometimes it is necessary or we can deal with it if the bottleneck to the consumer is not in the storage solution (eg. on the consumer Internet your link becomes the bottleneck). For users requiring high bandwidth storage over eg. NFS, an end-to-end application would just delay everything unnecessarily.
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First of all, the MITM issue will always exist. Nobody is prevented from setting up their own hotspot named Starbcuks, getting a certificate for it and sniffing whatever passes.
The first issue is, how are we managing the certificates and that is the same problem with using SSL certificates for 'identity' verification (IT'S NOT PEOPLE). How can we be sure the CA hasn't revoked the certificate if we can't connect to anything? Does it mean we have to pay big bucks for each hotspot to a Verisign-type place so we can assure our customers? If we want to roll our own, will clients be prevented or otherwise inconvenienced or scared away from connecting? When we have to start trusting CA's, how trustworthy are they to begin with and how trustworthy should they be? How can I trust any certificate or "open" wireless network being presented to me if I haven't been communicated the certificate or a password beforehand?
The second issue is, how are we sure any of the routers downstream of our connection are trustworthy? This will give people a false sense of security and will be abused. The best way to authenticate is still WPA2-Enterprise even for public networks if you want it to be secured, just give individualized tokens. Otherwise, leave the connection open and clients should be responsible for their own end-to-end encryption.
Why don't you just do it all in HTML? I created a 'web app' in a single HTML file (Requirements were interactive, universal (mobile, desktop, linux, mac, windows) offline access to a database and sending people a directory structure was just unacceptable).
Before that it was an Excel file but then the iPhone came along and Mac's were always left out and Office 2010 eventually ate the VBScript.
I created the full structure and intelligence to fetch the repetitive database stuff in PHP. Then to export it, the CSS was included, the JavaScript serialized and included, images were loaded and encoded in base64 and included and eventually excessive white spaces stripped. A 5MB HTML page that could be seen anywhere including images. I think IE(6) has a problem with it but then what doesn't it have a problem with.
Beyond the shiny and Microsoft phasing out support for it, what is new in Windows 7 that XP doesn't have. I mean, OS/2 was supported until a couple of years ago and still did what we wanted it to do.
Microsoft had promised us WinFS and a host of other things that originally would've made it into XP but now with 8 on the way still has not even a beta implementation. In the mean time much better, faster and smarter file systems have come (ZFS) and gone (Reiser).
They were called 'sprites' and required quite some work to have a lot of detail and a lot of detail required a lot of power to process even for simple modifications like lifting an arm and interpolating everything in between. In 3D space we call them voxels and recently some GPGPU's can work quite fast with them.
However on a standard (16-core, 8GB) computer rendering and tracing the collision, activation and interaction of specific voxels onto other voxels for about 5 movies of 100s (2048x2048) takes about 2 weeks of user interaction and 2 days of rendering. Yes, this is for scientific purposes where you do want that type of detail but imagine making even the simplest humanoid interpretation in a game (even just an outer shell) where specific voxels can be modified by incoming clusters of voxels (eg. a bullet) - this would require months of programmer and designer work if it can even be rendered in real time.
For the 2010 fiscal year, the president's base budget of the Department of spending on "overseas contingency operations" $663.8 billion. Overall the budget has over 1.1 trillion dollars set aside for direct military spending not to talk about the indirect costs and during the republican rule this was 1.6 trillion dollars.
The US spends roughly 5% of GDP, 50% of tax revenue on military spending, roughly 6x the amount that a militaristic country like China spends. Off course that is what the tea baggers want: less spending but don't cut any of the services and increase military spending so we can feel safe.
Did you know the US still has operations and bases in Germany and other places in Europe to keep the Nazi's from taking over?
You seriously have no idea about the technical aspects of this do you. YOU may not see a need or want for it as you only seem to need Fox News and affiliated blogging sites but I see a serious need beyond my current capacity.
I am CONTINUOUSLY using over 5Mbps in streaming services and downloads already and I regularly fill my 10Mbps cap and then I don't even have kids that use computers yet. I pay over $150 for this privilege, I can upgrade to a 15Mbps burst for another $50 but that is it before I need to go to a business level for roughly double that price tag.
Companies in my area doing research, downloading large data sets need serious bandwidth beyond the 20-30Mbps available to them. 100Mbps is a minimum in this new world and having it available at the current rates ($100/month) would simply make it possible for more applications to be developed more economically.
4G as currently implemented in the US is a joke. The EU has faster 3G than the fastest 4G. We have it available here too (Clearwire) but 1Mbps tops and 300ms ping time is unacceptable and as soon as you move beyond the city limits it becomes unavailable.
Because the average Internet connection in the US (and most cities including this one) is 3Mbps, not 15. Also to spur innovation and economy (as online business is booming, except in the US where it's less time consuming to DRIVE in my government sponsored car to RedBox than streaming it).
Loans get payed back with interest, no worries about a mere 100B when at least 10x that amount gets spent yearly on unnecessary military campaigns and another identical amount trying to keep old people alive that can't afford a private insurance as there is no public health care option.
As long as people pay for it, why bother? There are lower cost options available that give out the same paper. If you really want a special name on top, you should pay for it.
Either way this is a good initiative I think as I live in an area with a couple of Universities and Colleges. This won't only help the colleges but also the surrounding living areas and businesses and in return attract more people that have kids and need education.
Trust me, those contracting agencies will just hire the same person the company (or Fed) would've hired. The only benefit is that management can now claim the contractor did it and wash their hands of any blame. The contractor (or at worst, the contracting company) gets fired and another one gets hired with the same or even less qualifications, rinse and repeat.
The only things it does circumvent is unionization (which is the biggest problem in other departments among large companies and government). That's one thing you don't want, a unionized IT staff. IT people past help desk and management jobs (the actual sysadmins, network engineers) are more like doctor's - you want them to be responsible and be able to get and take the blame and not be shielded.
What I care about is MTTDL (Mean Time to Data Loss) of a complete system. Hard drives are unreliable as is any component in your computer. That's why you should make at the very least every individual component your data path follows double or triple redundant. This is easily accomplished these days, ZFS, RAID6 etc. Make sure you don't just rely on the mechanical parts of your system to keep your data safe.
What else you want to know is undetected data corruption. Hard disks are very bad at keeping data, SSD's may wear out too (as in the end there is still a physical/mechanical process) but you might be able to read the cells even if you can't write to it. On average hard disks will give an uncorrected error every 12TB read.
Besides that, SSD's give way more IOPS than any hard drive available (even the 15k RPM ones). So you can keep the system's MTTDL much lower as you have less parts and for the same price you could even invest more in redundancy (double mirror an SSD) instead of a set of RAID10's.
Usually those problems result in significant performance problems and THAT is why people notice and investigate. In most systems there is no reporting back to the end-user or the administrator and the SMART status has to be read with a special tool anyway.
All of the tech world was crying out over the introduction of such filters that were going to be used for child porn but overextended to include at first piracy and then other speech that was less acceptable and then on to speech that is currently free.
Off course the powers-that-be had this intention all along and the opposers vilified as child pornographers. Now it's too late, sites will be arbitrarily added and won't be able to removed fully ever again.
I don't mind paying money for games but the big studio's retail $50/game is a bit much unless it's a really good thing. I do pay for second hand titles if it's under $20. Given you get 5 games I usually end up forking $50 or more for these bundles.
After sleep mode the average Mac (SSD or not) takes 1 sec to come out of sleep, about 1s out of hibernation. IF (does anyone still turn off their laptop?) you turn off or reboot you get to a login prompt in about 16s. Even on non-SSD machines this is about similar, Snow Leopard and Lion use compressed directories to store much of the system and let the (ultrafast) memory and CPU handle the uncompressing while using less (ultraslow) hard disk bandwidth and seek time. I guess if you can get a compressed EXT4 or ZFS to boot Ubuntu off it would be at least 30-50% faster.
If I see "cloud computing" on anyone's resume I cringe. What part of the 'cloud' are you working on? Virtualization software, virtualization configuration, switches, networking, hardware, server assembly line, racking, wiring, architecture, a specific virtual server, HVAC, weather forecasting, producing rain? A cloud is (to me) one or more datacenters filled with a monoculture of servers.
Anyway. The benefit is that the GUI does a lot of the menial work (eg. Apache site configuration, disk shares, mail server or user provisioning), Open Directory integration with Mac, nice hardware/software combination (including all the bells and whistles) and top shelf support. Red Hat has really good support as well but HP/Dell support lacks unless you fork over the big bucks. Dell will actually retard claims if you run on something they don't directly recognize, sell or support (such as Scientific Linux) or use it for things the first line support thought was not fit for the hardware you bought (such as running a cluster).
If you're in the scientific field, XGrid is nice and easy, in schools or labs NetBoot (and using DeployStudio, you can get free non-Apple deployments as well) is one of those nice things and for small offices especially you can get a full server including a full groupware solution with unlimited seats for the cost of a single no-hardware Windows Server license.
I don't know if your career path was good but personally I wouldn't choose one that involves a buzzword.
5B is a lot of money to waste if there is nothing to show. Was it spent on Microsoft licensing? Probably a lot of it was given with such ties and 5B is easy to spend on licensing stuff. Was it spent on 'investigating' what needs to be changed? Probably as well as some administrator buildings could've been filled with random people looking for stuff to do but never producing any results.
What we need is for that type of money to be spent in an open fashion on stuff that is actually productive. Spending $5B over 100,000 schools in 10 years is useless. Give $1B to a single school or school district to invest in better buildings, infrastructure and reform it's set of teacher's, learn from it and use what you have learned as you go along and then give the next school $1B to do the same.
Beyond basic configuration, real Mac OS X sysadmins don't use the GUI's. The things the author gripes about (QTSS, MySQL, NFS) were never really expansive in the GUI tools beyond "enable networking" or "run # processes" or "set this service to run on port 8000". QTSS has been replaced, not removed and no longer requires server involvement beyond a file share. MySQL is replaced by PostgreSQL and as said before, beyond "enable networking" really had never any GUI admin tools thus we were still going to command line or phpMyAdmin. MySQL is still there by the way, not removed entirely. NFS same thing, shares were never done in the "NFS" tab, they were done in the "Sharing" tab together with AFP and SMB.
SMB as a PDC/BDC is maybe a slight loss in small environments but thanks to the licensing issues it was stuck on 2 and never could've made it bundled in Mac OS X to 3 (and Windows 7 support) as GPLv3 prevents the proprietary ties to the configuration subsystem. There is documentation available however on how to run Samba 3 (and binary packages as well) on Mac OS X Server and run it as a PDC/BDC against LDAP (which Open Directory is), it just won't be integrated.
I like that XSAN is now included for free. Great if you want to build a large mail or Apache or any type of cluster and very simple to set up. Also the Profiles addition will be a boon in many (especially the more mobile) environments. A lot of that could be done already (provisioning) in Open Directory (using MCX) but not many users like to be bothered with locking down their environment.
Look up their posts on YouTube. They clearly explains the many misconceptions creationists have with evolution such as macroevolution, abiogenesis, faith, literal interpretation of scripture and . Also the misconceptions armchair evolutionists have with evolution such as microevolution, variances, apologetics (stemming out of lack of knowledge on the subject, not lack of evidence for evolution), abiogenesis and evolution as an 'atheist' belief (being an atheist or a theist/deist doesn't relate to evolution).
I think the FFmpeg encoder is more widely used however even for AAC. It is bundled (or a dependency) in a lot of open source software.
If the system is 'embarrassingly parallel' and simple then the GPU would be a better use case. GPU's typically have a lot (200-400) cores that are optimized for embarrassingly simple calculations. Sure you could render everything on a CPU these days, simpler games could even run with an old school SVGA (simple frame buffer) card and let all the graphics be handled by the CPU as used to be the case in the 90's and is evidenced by the 'game emulators in JavaScript' we've been seeing lately but GPU's are usually fairly unused except for the ultramodern 3D shooters which also tax a CPU pretty hard.
We don't need government involvement in apps, websites or other sources that are simply informative in purpose. If you getting close to medical advice the creators should just tell you: this is not medical advice, if in doubt contact your doctor, do not use for diagnosis etc. If people are stupid and use it for it, why not, some believe and practice lot of old wive tales about medical things, some even believe in homeopathy, faith healing etc., government involvement over those things is simply encroaching on our rights.
The problem is not that the password is stored on the device, that is a problem occurring regardless of the device. The problem is that the program stores the password in an open, unauthenticated data store that other programs can access and is not encrypted. You can create your own encrypted container and store passwords in it (like Firefox stores passwords internally) or rely on a system-wide per-program encrypted container (like Mac OS X Keychain). Android just uses an unencrypted SQLite database with hardly any access controls. Most Android devices are also not encrypted (as compared to most Blackberries and iOS devices) since the manufacturers leave that 'option' to the 'business-class' devices like the Motorola Droid Pro.
And have those plans ever been exercised? There was a huge scare with the anthrax a couple of years ago which kinda fizzled as the perpetrator(s) didn't have the means or need to distribute or the Asian/Mexican bird/swine flu on larger scales showed that there is simply no ACTUAL response to those type of attacks that is either viable or affordable.
The CDC, FDA etc. response plans to protect anyone but the president and a handful of rich people are a running joke and waiting on a government agency to respond to any emergency for the rest of the population is simply asking for failure (Katrina, BP, ...).
I trust a well-designed and administered network over any government agency. What people (rephrase that: management) want is somebody to secure, update and maintain their computers for free (or paid for by somebody else) and the government dealings in recent years with the car manufacturers and banks is an excellent example of how to distribute the exuberant cost tags of a couple of companies and the mistakes in management to all citizens without any repercussions.
Apple has pretty good enterprise tools, directory support, image deployment. What I have noticed in my organization is that Windows admins simply don't want to investigate. We have an Apple rep (engineer) that gives free classes on anything we want and still the Windows admins complain Lion needs a 3rd party (expensive) full disk encryption, special programs to integrate with Active Directory and can't be imaged.
We're back to Solaris Express which seems to be maintained by Oracle and spinoff Nexenta which also has a free version.
ZFS does very well but it is a file system, not an application nor a distributed or networked file system (although it can be set up that way). I know applications that run end-to-end data integrity on top of ZFS because ZFS can maintain local integrity while the application keeps global integrity.
Usually those applications are very slow to store, retrieve and repair data but sometimes it is necessary or we can deal with it if the bottleneck to the consumer is not in the storage solution (eg. on the consumer Internet your link becomes the bottleneck). For users requiring high bandwidth storage over eg. NFS, an end-to-end application would just delay everything unnecessarily.