Microsoft will have to follow the standards this time because people (web developers and knowledgeable customers) won't put up anymore with custom development for specific browsers. ActiveX bit and will bite many corporate customers in the behind and with the plethora of portable devices, computers are not the only hardware that receive the web anymore.
Seriously. If your server is a big enough target where to have it's keys taken using this technique is beneficial (a key signing server for example) then you need a bit more protection against somebody hanging outside on a pole playing with your electricity supply.
There are several solutions out there: - Put the files on a server with a decent storage array. I have all my users working directly off this storage array, this is very simple if you're a Mac shop - Put the files on the offenders' computer automatically - if the user is too lazy to do it himself and has immunity, you could just rsync the whole thing to his system (every minute, hour or whatever you fancy). If he doesn't have a Mac and he needs to, give him one. - Get a better drive. If he can hammer the drive using file sharing over a gigabit connection, maybe you need better drives or a better computer. The new Mac Pro's are very powerful and with a RAID0/5 array of 4 drives I doubt you'll be feeling the load. There are also Firewire enclosures that will do for this purpose. - Shape his connection somehow. The built-in ipfw command can do this for you. - Put him in a VirtualBox environment and give him only 1 CPU and limited amount of RAM. His sharing will become CPU-bound instead of disc-bound. - Get an SSD (or array of). If he's generating too much IOPS, maybe an SSD will do. 100 IOPS vs 5000 IOPS may give you much better response times and if you get an Intel, OCZ Vertex or another non-budget SSD you'll get better read and write speeds as well. The 0.1ms vs 10ms access times will also help. - Check his application. If he's making his own applications/drive and then proceeds to hammer the drives into oblivion he might be doing something wrong.
I have to concur. I'm currently managing roughly 20TB of storage + 24TB backup. SAS-to-SAS or SAS-to-SATA enclosures with ZFS and/or a distributed file system works much better and has much better reliability than any of the other solutions.
The problem with these large datasets is silent data corruption and it happens a lot more than you can imagine. We did use FibreChannel with built-in RAID5 for a while but we had issues with that (1 drive fails and another one had silently corrupted a portion of the disk). We also had issues with one of the controllers failing and then having to pay a lot for replacement parts because the original manufacturer didn't sell the original enclosures or parts anymore (the enclosures had been off market for 3 years). The problem right now is that if the enclosure fails (which it will) that we can't read the data from the raw disks because the intelligence sits on the controllers.
We now are upgrading all our FibreChannel to dual-controller SAS arrays that are made out of commodity parts and can be easily replaced with other commodity parts from other manufacturers. Yes, it's more work to do it ourselves and I keep busy for an afternoon just assembling the things but at least we're not dependent anymore on any particular vendor, it's just as redundant (RAIDZ or RAIDZ2) and it guards against silent data corruption, no license fee for de-duplication or compression and disks are cheap.
We used to have tape but that is way too slow and/or expensive for multi-terabyte applications and way too sensitive to data loss. It costs more to keep spindles alive in a rack but at least we'll know that the data is there when all spindles are still running within 10 years.
Most likely the higher-up is either a contractor sponsored by Microsoft or Microsoft made a deal with them. Especially when they are Microsoft MVP's or the like or they recently got certified as a Gold Partner they are not allowed (by contract) to implement non-Microsoft solutions by penalty of losing their titles, partnerships and sponsorships as well as a host of customers brought on strategically by Microsoft.
On top of this we have the 27-byte page header which, although paling in comparison to the packet size encoding, is still much larger than necessary. Ok, it's a container format, nobody cares about an extra 27 bytes when you can buy TB of storage for virtually nothing. And if you're complaining because it needs to go in the intertubes, gz compression on the server does a very good job of extracting and compressing plain non-random text like page headers but again, MBits are cheap and unless you're living in the US they are plenty.
The version field could be disposed of, a single-bit marker being adequate to separate this first version from hypothetical future versions. One of the unused positions in the flags field could be used for this purpose It's kind of important to keep track of versions. If your player can't play the next version or an older version it should be able to detect that so it doesn't try-and-fail. It might also want to suggest what version of the player is required.
A 64-bit granule_position is completely overkill. 32 bits would be more than enough for the vast majority of use cases. In extreme cases, a one-bit flag could be used to signal an extended timestamp field. That's what they said about our memory too back in the early 90's. 32-bit addressing is enough, nobody will ever have more than 4G of RAM. Again, these open formats tend to be scalable across time because they need to fulfill a certain mission. Look at ZFS, they have 128-bit addressing but nobody (currently) needs that amount of storage.
32-bit elementary stream number? Are they anticipating files with four billion elementary streams? An eight-bit field, if not smaller, would seem more appropriate here. Why not, how many languages are there around the world? If you need to bring out a media file with subtitles and audio-tracks for each language, braille instructions and who knows what else for open access to certain media, you might want to use more than 256 streams.
The 32-bit page_sequence_number is inexplicable. The intent is to allow detection of page loss due to transmission errors. ISO MPEG-TS uses a 4-bit counter per 188-byte packet for this purpose, and that format is used where packet loss actually happens, unlike any use of Ogg to date. Well, maybe the makers intended Ogg to be used eventually to replace MPEG (c)(patented) and used across links with much higher transmission errors. Sometimes my MPEG-encoded stream I get from my DTV provider has enough errors to stall and cause artifacts. When NASA wants to use Ogg for a non-repeatable stream from outer space, they should be able to. Again, overhead is a small cost to pay these days.
A mandatory 32-bit checksum is nothing but a waste of space when using a reliable storage/transmission medium. Again, a flag could be used to signal the presence of an optional checksum field Ah, well, what is reliable these days? Ever used a large array of hard drives? Ever used a freakin' dial-up connection? As the makers of ZFS, Google and a few others recently have shown hard drive and memory reliability is not as good as we take for granted. Silent data corruption is a major cause of data loss these days.
With the changes suggested above, the page header would shrink from 27 bytes to 12 bytes in size. Whoop-dee-doo, you made it half the size but you sacrificed reliability, error correction and future-proofness.
Latency You show that the overhead is anywhere from 1% to 7%. That might not be the requirements for latency-sensitive applications but then you would again sacrifice other features. That is always a balance between speed and reliability but for most applications it doesn't really matter if the movie needs to be buffered 5ms longer.
Random access You've got somewhat of a point there, maybe somebody will find a solution for that. The issues around indexing however is that seeking within a stream is possible. HTTP servers
1. Good luck finding an API or IDE that is compatible with all those platforms at once 2. Good luck finding similar functionality across all OS'es let alone all devices 3. Good luck finding the same performance across all devices
Each platform needs to be developed for separately because there's no 'gcc' or 'gtk' or 'qt' that makes anything uniform across all platforms.
Besides, almost none of the devices out in the market besides some Nokia, Apple and Android devices even have the power and the chips capable to download and play back videos AT ALL. None of the other devices (WinMo, Symbian,...) even have standard browsers with support for Flash OR HTML5 so web developing is also out of the picture.
And the iPhone has the biggest marketshare in 1. "smartphones that you can develop for without corporate support ($$$)" or 2. "smartphones with a viable marketplace" (of course success of 2 is because of 1). Also the Maemo, Android and iPhone's are the only phones where the device is not locked down by default by the provider.
They don't want to tax themselves, they want to tax their end-users who are clueless enough to run Windows on anything from embedded devices to servers and then wonder why it gets infected. They want their customers to pay taxes to fix the mistakes they make.
It's time everybody just stops defaulting to Microsoft whenever a purchase decision is made.
Everybody is complaining about how much health care would cost but if you can replace Social Security, Health Care, Veterans Benefits and Medicare with "Universal Health Care" you would be able to spend $5000/person in the US on health care. That is a about as much we currently spend per capita on health care and a whole lot more than many of the countries that already have government run healthcare.
I never understood this trading thing. Basically, all you do is transfer money around and hope you get more by making the right choices. However by making money, you are causing somebody else to lose money. All-in-all the global system doesn't make or lose any money unless somebody adds more product thereby reducing the worth of the same product already in the hands of somebody else.
I also don't know how doing bad things here can cause the markets to crash. You either have stock or you don't, selling stuff you don't have should be impossible because the market should keep track of what each person has. If all-of-a-sudden there is a major increase in money going around for a certain product without anyone actually producing the product (a so-called bubble) it should be clearly visible.
Anyway, maybe I'm ignorant but for some reason, some people get rich off it.
No Windows systems can hook into a WSUS server and there are configuration settings that enable a sysadmin to remote desktop into somebody's computer that could've done the job just as well. That's what I was talking about, they don't know how to enable the built-in, standard tools of the Industry so they have to turn to a 2-click tool that not only does that stuff but also a lot more and is open for a lot more abuse. You can send a package through any package management software that will spy on users and send back a video feed, however I doubt the principal or anyone but the sysadmins would know how to do that.
LANRev can be used without authentication by anyone on the network and will call back from anywhere to see if there is a request to open a connection to the host. That's very convenient indeed to but the use of it to spy on people but spying is not the purpose of the tool.
This software was not purposed for the invasion of privacy but the users/sysadmins made it that way. This software is a management tool for distribution of patches to software similar to eg. an apt-get repository combined with Puppet. Again, this tool can be used or abused.
The problem is that you don't have a proper separation of duties nor a proper oversight of the use of resources. However this is a problem in most schools and probably a lot of companies as well. If you have a company laptop, you could be the victim as well however since it's not kids being spied on it probably wouldn't make headlines. This is the perfect storm of 'think of the children' vs. 'oh no hakzor tarrarists'.
Another issue is that for the Windows platform you practically need this type of software and the bigger issue is that the sysadmins didn't know about or how to use the standard, built-in tools the rest of the industry uses so they needed something that can be installed and used in a click or two and costs quite a few thousands of our tax money as well.
Well, since the US has no health care and the companies will hit you with crazy amounts of co-payments and overages I found the cheapest way to get health care is to get a flight back to any country but the US if anything major happens. If you can't fly, I am living close enough to Canada to drive there.
If you're living down south, go to Mexico. If you're living near Florida, go to Cuba or take a cruise up to the Bahamas or so, if you're living up north go to Canada or fly anywhere in Europe. Once you're there, walk into any emergency room. Without any lines, without any questions they will take care of you for free, any longer stays might be charged but the rates are very good ($90/day in Europe), comparable to hotel rates. If you have children, you can request a bed to stay with your children without a problem even if you're not sick.
Most schools don't have a decent IT admin. They either cannot afford it or they are not competent enough to seek out and hire the competent. In the first case this usually results in a almost-retired technology teacher becoming the sys/network admin for a multi-campus site using CAT5 held together with wire nuts, in the former case you get an ego-tripping idiot that once attended a Microsoft Valueless Professional sales seminar.
Bonjour is an integral part of iTunes and Mac OS X. It does things like automatically discover people on your network sharing their music with you (from either Linux, Mac or Windows), it automatically discovers other services like Apache webservers, printers, configuration pages, iPhone/iPod's for remote control of your iTunes library, AppleTV's and a bunch of other services that are available over Bonjour.
Microsoft bundles their operating system with the exact same functionality, just based on a non-open source protocol and hardly used by anyone but a few printers. Ubuntu and OpenSolaris also installs a Bonjour daemon (Avahi) just for kicks.
On the other hand, the more responsible population generally has/wants better jobs than being a cop and the institutions themselves filter out any outliers (too smart, too expensive) leaving only those that have no viable other choices (because they're undereducated or underperforming) or those that like the power trips (because they've been repressed at school or home or because they're sociopaths).
Well, the iPhone already has an IMAP application called 'Mail' and since they added Spotlight search on the iPhone, full-text inbox searches are also/still possible.
Of course it is, it's bad for the environment (paper, energy for print, energy to transport it, waste), it's unwieldy (heavier and bigger than say an iPad or Kindle) and it's inconvenient (yet another thing to keep in your hands or suitcase).
I don't know why papers are not concentrating on their digital versions. If they can make a paper for $1.50/day in real paper including all the overhead of actual printing and distribution while still maintaining an online version, the cost for just the online version should be a fraction of that cost. That fraction most definitely can be offset by some Google Ads.
Maybe you should've better investigated the options before you buy $100 worth of accessories. iGo (offered at both Radio Shack and AT&T) may be a bit more expensive to start off with but whenever you change systems, you just buy another tip ($2.50) and you're good to go.
Another option would be to buy a USB charger and buy a USB charger cable for your phone. The USB chargers are dirt cheap ($3-10) and work with other devices like iPod's etc. too.
I can reimage hundreds of computers in a few hours. It all depends on their uniformity and operating systems. Windows has to be imaged on similar hardware or they will BSOD even if they have been sysprepped, for Linux and Mac any image will work on any machine (given you have a fairly standard modular kernel and the architecture stays the same).
This is over the next 10 years. Europe already has 100Mbps to the home and Japan has Gigabit to the home. It's not that hard to do, cable (DOCSIS 3.0) already supports 300Mbps down/100Mbps up. VDSL supports 100Mbps too. In 10 years, the rest of the world most likely will have gigabit or 10Gb to the home.
The issue is that the carriers rather suck you dry than offer you better service. All they have to do is enable the service and maybe put some more effort in expanding the backbone. There is enough dark fibre and even lighted fibre that is ready to support those speeds. How much do you pay for DSL/Cable? How much subscribers does your ISP have? How many years did you have the same speeds now? 5 years? 10 years?
The really small ISP's just rents/leases somebody else's hardware and cables, when the parent company goes up in speed, they will go up too.
Sun has recently been purchased by Oracle. Oracle doesn't and Sun did (past tense) give up data.
Either way, these numbers need not necessarily be public does it? All it does is give fodder to the racists and the anti-fanboys. The regulators should be able to review the data and make sure everyone is in compliance. I don't see the need for these numbers to be publicized, there is already too much "reverse" racism and feminism going around in this country.
Even so, the PRNG on those devices is not random enough (due to processor constraints) and the packages too small, too uniform (it's voice compressed with a very narrow filter) and too many for the encryption not being able to withstand a decent sized computing cluster. Sure the full stream will probably not be decrypted but enough for it to be understandable.
Encryption is difficult to do. Encryption of full-sentence text (e-mail or chat) would be much safer than voice.
It's simple as that. They don't NEED your SSN - that is only used to bring up your credit score and they will offer you services accordingly. I have opened bank accounts with invalid SSN's, non-existing phone numbers and bad addresses. They usually go get the manager or another senior member and all they say is: can't find a credit history on you, we will only give you $300 limit on your credit cards. Some banks (Bank of America) and companies (Geico, AllState) will simply refuse service saying you don't have a long enough credit history but there are others that will accept you.
Then again, those are the only institutions that ask for your SSN. You can get most membership/discount cards with completely bogus information. They don't require the information but the drone at the front office doesn't know that and probably not even the manager at the store. Once you get to their legal department they will say, that's ok.
I found all this out because for a while I didn't have an SSN number (resident alien). I even got a drivers license without a valid SSN. Usually all they require is an extra proof of identification or a bill sent to the address you specified.
Slashdot Mirror
OGG Theora? SVG? PNG?
Microsoft will have to follow the standards this time because people (web developers and knowledgeable customers) won't put up anymore with custom development for specific browsers. ActiveX bit and will bite many corporate customers in the behind and with the plethora of portable devices, computers are not the only hardware that receive the web anymore.
http://www.apc.com/
Seriously. If your server is a big enough target where to have it's keys taken using this technique is beneficial (a key signing server for example) then you need a bit more protection against somebody hanging outside on a pole playing with your electricity supply.
There are several solutions out there:
- Put the files on a server with a decent storage array. I have all my users working directly off this storage array, this is very simple if you're a Mac shop
- Put the files on the offenders' computer automatically - if the user is too lazy to do it himself and has immunity, you could just rsync the whole thing to his system (every minute, hour or whatever you fancy). If he doesn't have a Mac and he needs to, give him one.
- Get a better drive. If he can hammer the drive using file sharing over a gigabit connection, maybe you need better drives or a better computer. The new Mac Pro's are very powerful and with a RAID0/5 array of 4 drives I doubt you'll be feeling the load. There are also Firewire enclosures that will do for this purpose.
- Shape his connection somehow. The built-in ipfw command can do this for you.
- Put him in a VirtualBox environment and give him only 1 CPU and limited amount of RAM. His sharing will become CPU-bound instead of disc-bound.
- Get an SSD (or array of). If he's generating too much IOPS, maybe an SSD will do. 100 IOPS vs 5000 IOPS may give you much better response times and if you get an Intel, OCZ Vertex or another non-budget SSD you'll get better read and write speeds as well. The 0.1ms vs 10ms access times will also help.
- Check his application. If he's making his own applications/drive and then proceeds to hammer the drives into oblivion he might be doing something wrong.
I have to concur. I'm currently managing roughly 20TB of storage + 24TB backup. SAS-to-SAS or SAS-to-SATA enclosures with ZFS and/or a distributed file system works much better and has much better reliability than any of the other solutions.
The problem with these large datasets is silent data corruption and it happens a lot more than you can imagine. We did use FibreChannel with built-in RAID5 for a while but we had issues with that (1 drive fails and another one had silently corrupted a portion of the disk). We also had issues with one of the controllers failing and then having to pay a lot for replacement parts because the original manufacturer didn't sell the original enclosures or parts anymore (the enclosures had been off market for 3 years). The problem right now is that if the enclosure fails (which it will) that we can't read the data from the raw disks because the intelligence sits on the controllers.
We now are upgrading all our FibreChannel to dual-controller SAS arrays that are made out of commodity parts and can be easily replaced with other commodity parts from other manufacturers. Yes, it's more work to do it ourselves and I keep busy for an afternoon just assembling the things but at least we're not dependent anymore on any particular vendor, it's just as redundant (RAIDZ or RAIDZ2) and it guards against silent data corruption, no license fee for de-duplication or compression and disks are cheap.
We used to have tape but that is way too slow and/or expensive for multi-terabyte applications and way too sensitive to data loss. It costs more to keep spindles alive in a rack but at least we'll know that the data is there when all spindles are still running within 10 years.
Most likely the higher-up is either a contractor sponsored by Microsoft or Microsoft made a deal with them. Especially when they are Microsoft MVP's or the like or they recently got certified as a Gold Partner they are not allowed (by contract) to implement non-Microsoft solutions by penalty of losing their titles, partnerships and sponsorships as well as a host of customers brought on strategically by Microsoft.
His complaints:
On top of this we have the 27-byte page header which, although paling in comparison to the packet size encoding, is still much larger than necessary.
Ok, it's a container format, nobody cares about an extra 27 bytes when you can buy TB of storage for virtually nothing. And if you're complaining because it needs to go in the intertubes, gz compression on the server does a very good job of extracting and compressing plain non-random text like page headers but again, MBits are cheap and unless you're living in the US they are plenty.
The version field could be disposed of, a single-bit marker being adequate to separate this first version from hypothetical future versions. One of the unused positions in the flags field could be used for this purpose
It's kind of important to keep track of versions. If your player can't play the next version or an older version it should be able to detect that so it doesn't try-and-fail. It might also want to suggest what version of the player is required.
A 64-bit granule_position is completely overkill. 32 bits would be more than enough for the vast majority of use cases. In extreme cases, a one-bit flag could be used to signal an extended timestamp field.
That's what they said about our memory too back in the early 90's. 32-bit addressing is enough, nobody will ever have more than 4G of RAM. Again, these open formats tend to be scalable across time because they need to fulfill a certain mission. Look at ZFS, they have 128-bit addressing but nobody (currently) needs that amount of storage.
32-bit elementary stream number? Are they anticipating files with four billion elementary streams? An eight-bit field, if not smaller, would seem more appropriate here.
Why not, how many languages are there around the world? If you need to bring out a media file with subtitles and audio-tracks for each language, braille instructions and who knows what else for open access to certain media, you might want to use more than 256 streams.
The 32-bit page_sequence_number is inexplicable. The intent is to allow detection of page loss due to transmission errors. ISO MPEG-TS uses a 4-bit counter per 188-byte packet for this purpose, and that format is used where packet loss actually happens, unlike any use of Ogg to date.
Well, maybe the makers intended Ogg to be used eventually to replace MPEG (c)(patented) and used across links with much higher transmission errors. Sometimes my MPEG-encoded stream I get from my DTV provider has enough errors to stall and cause artifacts. When NASA wants to use Ogg for a non-repeatable stream from outer space, they should be able to. Again, overhead is a small cost to pay these days.
A mandatory 32-bit checksum is nothing but a waste of space when using a reliable storage/transmission medium. Again, a flag could be used to signal the presence of an optional checksum field
Ah, well, what is reliable these days? Ever used a large array of hard drives? Ever used a freakin' dial-up connection? As the makers of ZFS, Google and a few others recently have shown hard drive and memory reliability is not as good as we take for granted. Silent data corruption is a major cause of data loss these days.
With the changes suggested above, the page header would shrink from 27 bytes to 12 bytes in size.
Whoop-dee-doo, you made it half the size but you sacrificed reliability, error correction and future-proofness.
Latency
You show that the overhead is anywhere from 1% to 7%. That might not be the requirements for latency-sensitive applications but then you would again sacrifice other features. That is always a balance between speed and reliability but for most applications it doesn't really matter if the movie needs to be buffered 5ms longer.
Random access
You've got somewhat of a point there, maybe somebody will find a solution for that. The issues around indexing however is that seeking within a stream is possible. HTTP servers
1. Good luck finding an API or IDE that is compatible with all those platforms at once
2. Good luck finding similar functionality across all OS'es let alone all devices
3. Good luck finding the same performance across all devices
Each platform needs to be developed for separately because there's no 'gcc' or 'gtk' or 'qt' that makes anything uniform across all platforms.
Besides, almost none of the devices out in the market besides some Nokia, Apple and Android devices even have the power and the chips capable to download and play back videos AT ALL. None of the other devices (WinMo, Symbian, ...) even have standard browsers with support for Flash OR HTML5 so web developing is also out of the picture.
And the iPhone has the biggest marketshare in 1. "smartphones that you can develop for without corporate support ($$$)" or 2. "smartphones with a viable marketplace" (of course success of 2 is because of 1). Also the Maemo, Android and iPhone's are the only phones where the device is not locked down by default by the provider.
They don't want to tax themselves, they want to tax their end-users who are clueless enough to run Windows on anything from embedded devices to servers and then wonder why it gets infected. They want their customers to pay taxes to fix the mistakes they make.
It's time everybody just stops defaulting to Microsoft whenever a purchase decision is made.
Everybody is complaining about how much health care would cost but if you can replace Social Security, Health Care, Veterans Benefits and Medicare with "Universal Health Care" you would be able to spend $5000/person in the US on health care. That is a about as much we currently spend per capita on health care and a whole lot more than many of the countries that already have government run healthcare.
I never understood this trading thing. Basically, all you do is transfer money around and hope you get more by making the right choices. However by making money, you are causing somebody else to lose money. All-in-all the global system doesn't make or lose any money unless somebody adds more product thereby reducing the worth of the same product already in the hands of somebody else.
I also don't know how doing bad things here can cause the markets to crash. You either have stock or you don't, selling stuff you don't have should be impossible because the market should keep track of what each person has. If all-of-a-sudden there is a major increase in money going around for a certain product without anyone actually producing the product (a so-called bubble) it should be clearly visible.
Anyway, maybe I'm ignorant but for some reason, some people get rich off it.
No Windows systems can hook into a WSUS server and there are configuration settings that enable a sysadmin to remote desktop into somebody's computer that could've done the job just as well. That's what I was talking about, they don't know how to enable the built-in, standard tools of the Industry so they have to turn to a 2-click tool that not only does that stuff but also a lot more and is open for a lot more abuse. You can send a package through any package management software that will spy on users and send back a video feed, however I doubt the principal or anyone but the sysadmins would know how to do that.
LANRev can be used without authentication by anyone on the network and will call back from anywhere to see if there is a request to open a connection to the host. That's very convenient indeed to but the use of it to spy on people but spying is not the purpose of the tool.
This software was not purposed for the invasion of privacy but the users/sysadmins made it that way. This software is a management tool for distribution of patches to software similar to eg. an apt-get repository combined with Puppet. Again, this tool can be used or abused.
The problem is that you don't have a proper separation of duties nor a proper oversight of the use of resources. However this is a problem in most schools and probably a lot of companies as well. If you have a company laptop, you could be the victim as well however since it's not kids being spied on it probably wouldn't make headlines. This is the perfect storm of 'think of the children' vs. 'oh no hakzor tarrarists'.
Another issue is that for the Windows platform you practically need this type of software and the bigger issue is that the sysadmins didn't know about or how to use the standard, built-in tools the rest of the industry uses so they needed something that can be installed and used in a click or two and costs quite a few thousands of our tax money as well.
Well, since the US has no health care and the companies will hit you with crazy amounts of co-payments and overages I found the cheapest way to get health care is to get a flight back to any country but the US if anything major happens. If you can't fly, I am living close enough to Canada to drive there.
If you're living down south, go to Mexico. If you're living near Florida, go to Cuba or take a cruise up to the Bahamas or so, if you're living up north go to Canada or fly anywhere in Europe. Once you're there, walk into any emergency room. Without any lines, without any questions they will take care of you for free, any longer stays might be charged but the rates are very good ($90/day in Europe), comparable to hotel rates. If you have children, you can request a bed to stay with your children without a problem even if you're not sick.
Most schools don't have a decent IT admin. They either cannot afford it or they are not competent enough to seek out and hire the competent. In the first case this usually results in a almost-retired technology teacher becoming the sys/network admin for a multi-campus site using CAT5 held together with wire nuts, in the former case you get an ego-tripping idiot that once attended a Microsoft Valueless Professional sales seminar.
I think he was talking about the religion called "nationalism". It's a very corrupted cult which a lot of people are loyal to to an unhealthy extent.
Bonjour is an integral part of iTunes and Mac OS X. It does things like automatically discover people on your network sharing their music with you (from either Linux, Mac or Windows), it automatically discovers other services like Apache webservers, printers, configuration pages, iPhone/iPod's for remote control of your iTunes library, AppleTV's and a bunch of other services that are available over Bonjour.
Microsoft bundles their operating system with the exact same functionality, just based on a non-open source protocol and hardly used by anyone but a few printers. Ubuntu and OpenSolaris also installs a Bonjour daemon (Avahi) just for kicks.
On the other hand, the more responsible population generally has/wants better jobs than being a cop and the institutions themselves filter out any outliers (too smart, too expensive) leaving only those that have no viable other choices (because they're undereducated or underperforming) or those that like the power trips (because they've been repressed at school or home or because they're sociopaths).
Well, the iPhone already has an IMAP application called 'Mail' and since they added Spotlight search on the iPhone, full-text inbox searches are also/still possible.
Of course it is, it's bad for the environment (paper, energy for print, energy to transport it, waste), it's unwieldy (heavier and bigger than say an iPad or Kindle) and it's inconvenient (yet another thing to keep in your hands or suitcase).
I don't know why papers are not concentrating on their digital versions. If they can make a paper for $1.50/day in real paper including all the overhead of actual printing and distribution while still maintaining an online version, the cost for just the online version should be a fraction of that cost. That fraction most definitely can be offset by some Google Ads.
Maybe you should've better investigated the options before you buy $100 worth of accessories. iGo (offered at both Radio Shack and AT&T) may be a bit more expensive to start off with but whenever you change systems, you just buy another tip ($2.50) and you're good to go.
Another option would be to buy a USB charger and buy a USB charger cable for your phone. The USB chargers are dirt cheap ($3-10) and work with other devices like iPod's etc. too.
I can reimage hundreds of computers in a few hours. It all depends on their uniformity and operating systems. Windows has to be imaged on similar hardware or they will BSOD even if they have been sysprepped, for Linux and Mac any image will work on any machine (given you have a fairly standard modular kernel and the architecture stays the same).
This is over the next 10 years. Europe already has 100Mbps to the home and Japan has Gigabit to the home. It's not that hard to do, cable (DOCSIS 3.0) already supports 300Mbps down/100Mbps up. VDSL supports 100Mbps too. In 10 years, the rest of the world most likely will have gigabit or 10Gb to the home.
The issue is that the carriers rather suck you dry than offer you better service. All they have to do is enable the service and maybe put some more effort in expanding the backbone. There is enough dark fibre and even lighted fibre that is ready to support those speeds. How much do you pay for DSL/Cable? How much subscribers does your ISP have? How many years did you have the same speeds now? 5 years? 10 years?
The really small ISP's just rents/leases somebody else's hardware and cables, when the parent company goes up in speed, they will go up too.
Sun has recently been purchased by Oracle. Oracle doesn't and Sun did (past tense) give up data.
Either way, these numbers need not necessarily be public does it? All it does is give fodder to the racists and the anti-fanboys. The regulators should be able to review the data and make sure everyone is in compliance. I don't see the need for these numbers to be publicized, there is already too much "reverse" racism and feminism going around in this country.
Even so, the PRNG on those devices is not random enough (due to processor constraints) and the packages too small, too uniform (it's voice compressed with a very narrow filter) and too many for the encryption not being able to withstand a decent sized computing cluster. Sure the full stream will probably not be decrypted but enough for it to be understandable.
Encryption is difficult to do. Encryption of full-sentence text (e-mail or chat) would be much safer than voice.
It's simple as that. They don't NEED your SSN - that is only used to bring up your credit score and they will offer you services accordingly. I have opened bank accounts with invalid SSN's, non-existing phone numbers and bad addresses. They usually go get the manager or another senior member and all they say is: can't find a credit history on you, we will only give you $300 limit on your credit cards. Some banks (Bank of America) and companies (Geico, AllState) will simply refuse service saying you don't have a long enough credit history but there are others that will accept you.
Then again, those are the only institutions that ask for your SSN. You can get most membership/discount cards with completely bogus information. They don't require the information but the drone at the front office doesn't know that and probably not even the manager at the store. Once you get to their legal department they will say, that's ok.
I found all this out because for a while I didn't have an SSN number (resident alien). I even got a drivers license without a valid SSN. Usually all they require is an extra proof of identification or a bill sent to the address you specified.