Making a good, reliable large flash drive (as in >128GB) is also hard. The same issue as hard drives, they have to be very precision and the chips so small, only a few can afford them. Sure, making a 512MB or 1GB flash drive, everybody can do these days, but making a 200G SSD for a decent price seems to be a bigger problem. Next to that, even those relatively 'simple' flashdrives go for about $5-10/gigabyte but of course they have the profit margins so a 200G would cost easily more than $200 retail. I buy a 1TB hard drive with the same relative reliability (hard drives in enterprise environments which are driving large capacity are usually replaced after 3 years anyway way before they break) for less than that.
How many people live in the UK? 1 Million? I didn't think so. How many phone calls does your family make on average? How about the place you work at? Just the records of who made what phone call to who would be in the multi-terabytes per day for the whole country.
This has been proposed in many different forms in different many places (ranging from small companies to governments) and it is shut down just because it is too expensive to maintain. You're talking about storage, I'm talking about bandwidth, how many pipes do you need and how big do they need to be to catch-up every day on the continuous stream of data. Think about stock exchanges, that's the type of infrastructure you would need. Now multiply that by the ratio of companies on the stock exchange against the citizens in the country.
Of course they're getting paid by the content providers. Not necessarily money, but MS has an ad-revenue part (MSN, MSNBC), a search-revenue part (Live) and a media-revenue part (MSNBC, Zune). They never sold a Windows Media license directly to the 'end-user', they do that through their partners. If you buy a HP or Dell laptop, most likely you're going to find a Windows Media OS on there but they only make about $3-13 on that license. If they can make a 'deal' with News Corp. where they gain $1,000,000 in benefits on the several services they provide for them, you can permit screwing over a few hundred customers.
It's really difficult to find a decent and working MCU (Multipoint Control Unit) that's both free and allows to see all participants at the same time. Asterisk has a solution, but only one participant can be seen at the same time. There is Caltech's Java client as mentioned above and VLVC but that's not really complete or working.
I settled on using OpenMeetings (www.openmeetings.net). It's FOSS, based on Java, Flash and Red5 and it works really well.
There is a lot of protectionism going around. Both in Europe and the US, small farmers get subsidies because they can't compete with the cheaper products from bigger farmers elsewhere (not necessarily China but usually out-of-state farmers). This in turn makes it that they don't make any effort to expand to match or exceed the possibilities of the other farmers since they get the money for free anyway.
In this world, you'll have to match your bigger competitors somehow. Whether it's usability, customer service or quality, it can be done since all the little businesses aren't dead yet and every year there are new businesses opened but giving money because they're small just makes them more complacent in general.
I don't know, go into the SVN or CVS repo and find out yourself. Luckily you're not using closed source where you don't even know if the code does it's work nor do you know the programmer.
And I heard the 'we get to sue x if we buy from x' but when was the last time you sued Microsoft because of your system being part of a botnet? Or Oracle because their database corrupted. Heck, it's difficult enough to sue or set responsible PeopleSoft or SAP for the defective product they (after 3 years of implementation and about 200 contractors) don't/can't deliver, imagine something you DID get.
Actually you're wrong, both AMD and Intel emulate an x86 (CISC) on a RISC processor. I'm just being pedantic, I know...
There is little difference between an emulator and an interpreter. From a CS standpoint, the emulator emulates a processor or process (eg. by creating a virtual machine) so that instructions given can be run within the emulator, the emulator in itself is a host. An interpreter interprets instructions and gives them through to the host processor for execution, the interpreter in itself is not a host. So Wine is not an emulator, it's an interpreter. Programmatically, an emulator can be ported to different architectures than the intended software was made to run on.
According to the dictionary, an emulator in computing reproduces the function or action of a different computer or software system, an interpreter is a program that can analyze and execute a program line by line. In the fuzzy response here, I would consider it an interpreter since it doesn't reproduce the function (or lack thereof) or action of a full Windows system, it analyzes the commands given to it and executes them in userland Linux.
You could always switch to electrical energy for the vehicles that maintain the sites and transport/dig up the uranium. You would build one reactor that is not carbon neutral and then you'd be able to power enough vehicles to build all your other reactors fully carbon neutral.
You know, I have a digital certificate that does that for me. It automatically signs my e-mail and 'smart' filters and e-mail clients know that non-signed e-mail from me is not to be trusted as much.
Get your free personal certificate and if 2 people have certificates, e-mail gets encrypted between you! There are a number of providers that give them.
Heat = Wattage which is Voltage * Current. Lowering your voltage and subsequently heightening your current in equal portions shouldn't be a problem. Or do you think Americans have double size wires in the streets/homes compared to Europeans? I think we'd all have 10,000V in our homes if that were so.
Apparently the only person that thinks non-commercial Linux development is a bust is the reporter from ZD Asia. The interviewed thinks about it totally different although 3 questions border on that subject and one is even somewhat insulting, Steve keeps hammering that this is a non-profit and they've been doing it like that for 15 years. There is no "problem" here as the interviewer makes it out to be.
It's quite easy, boot up the computer from that disk and you can reset the passwords in a few minutes. Linux-based too for that matter.
FTFA: The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer. It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for evidence on site.
Apparently just some tools-on-a-disk. If it can bypass the encrypted file systems and other secure stuff, then there is a problem and the so-called "NSA-key" is not just myth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY).
What most people ask in my environment about the iMac's (from the G5 onwards but especially the new batch): where is the computer? since they expect a big bulky or at least some type of tower where you put the CPU in. I have a dead iMac G5 next to a same size dead LCD screen in my office and sometimes one of the passer-by's ask: if you're throwing away those monitors, can I have them.
I like the new iMac's for desktop environments. They take up less space, are quite powerful and they're also easy to repair (3 screws gives access to everything).
Scientist are still looking for several elements on the periodic table. The 'inventor' of the periodic table, Mendelev noticed that elements ordered on the table have certain mathematical properties against each other and thus calculated where certain elements should appear and what some of their properties should be (so they know what to look for). Of course, some (especially the super-heavy elements) are synthesized (although they might appear naturally but are not yet discovered) highly radioactive and some of them have very short half-lives (hours, seconds or even milliseconds).
Either get a dog or an alarm system. Criminals don't like either and it's quite a deterrent for them, they'll rather skip to another neighborhood than messing with it. Alarm systems need to be armed though so you'll have to keep it up, but once it goes off, the criminal will run. It only costs $10-50/month and takes a big chunk out of your homeowners (depending on your neighborhood) and can possibly be brought into your taxes if you have a home office. If you're a DIY: http://www.smarthome.com/alarm.html, if not, go to the big boys like ADT or Brinks.
I work at a University with a large medical site/hospital/research and I've worked in several businesses that have to have HIPAA or SoX compliance. The laws state and the legal advisors make sure you know this: if your data was encrypted and then lost disclosure is not mandatory and thus the agreement of the employer then takes over, if you disclose it anyway, you lose your job.
Another example: If you have a database, it is sufficient to only protect/encrypt one of the (i think it's five) identifiers to be compliant. For example if you have name, first name, address, ssn and birthdate, you only would have to encrypt the ssn to be safe. Although in another database or even table you can have partial ssn, customer number and credit card number, you encrypt credit card number and your safe. If both are compromised neither have to be disclosed if both tables were not used in the same application and thus had different access controls. Anyone with some database knowledge of course knows that as superuser (what you're usually hacked as) you can easily join the tables to get a more complete picture.
I know of places that have lost, have been hacked into or have misplaced thousands of data records including credit card numbers etc. and have not needed to disclose simply because they used 'some form of encryption'. That the encryption/decryption keys could've been compromised at the same time or at another time is none of their concern, they abide by the law.
Actually, it would be better to wipe their hard drive clean since then they would be directly impacted and see the loss caused by their stupidity. I already heard from users: yeah, I know I have a virus/trojan but it doesn't really do anything bad to my computer and that virus scanner makes my computer slower so I'll leave it there.
Also, it would give us geeks some extra income and we would have the opportunity to load Ubuntu on their machines.
And how do bigiron servers do it? Trust me, I've worked with bigiron and there are several solutions:
Some type of virtualization, partitioning or jails, and you can emulate a cluster of machines with minimal performance impact. The 'host' doesn't necessarily need to be upgraded frequently since it's very minimal in function (load a kernel into a processor).
You have your monthly/yearly maintenance that takes everything offline at 3 am and upgrades it if necessary. It's not unusual to see those things 3-5 major versions behind though depending on the work. Just like in Linux, a lot of it is modularized so much, that you don't have to take the whole thing offline to upgrade parts of it. If you have a somewhat decent vendor, they'll backport recent patches to kernel modules to your version and you can update.
100% is not possible with a single machine, even if you want it, there is no way that you will foresee any updates, patches or just plain people doing something stupid or stuff breaking. Any modern single server (mainframe) costing more than a mere $100,000 is most likely a machine consisting out of several machines already.
And there wouldn't be any spammers if there weren't any prospects for them.
Stupid people are the cause of a lot of limitations, problems and laws in our society. Not only causing handicapped people problems but everybody else, raising costs for everyone.
If we had a way to weed out the stupid, greedy people from society we wouldn't have a credit crisis, we wouldn't have spammers or junk mail.
Actually I know my servers have been in 50 degrees Celsius environment for the past few years, nothing bad happened yet to them (not even a hard drive crash)
Slashdot Mirror
Making a good, reliable large flash drive (as in >128GB) is also hard. The same issue as hard drives, they have to be very precision and the chips so small, only a few can afford them. Sure, making a 512MB or 1GB flash drive, everybody can do these days, but making a 200G SSD for a decent price seems to be a bigger problem. Next to that, even those relatively 'simple' flashdrives go for about $5-10/gigabyte but of course they have the profit margins so a 200G would cost easily more than $200 retail. I buy a 1TB hard drive with the same relative reliability (hard drives in enterprise environments which are driving large capacity are usually replaced after 3 years anyway way before they break) for less than that.
Scary:
From Slashdot to Girl, 3 clicks
From Slashdot to Sex, 2 clicks
From Slashdot to Microsoft, 1 click
Interesting, from Slashdot to your basement (4 clicks), you actually go through Apple, Inc.
Maybe you didn't know you better keep receipts for all the music you bought, otherwise it becomes illegal.
How many people live in the UK? 1 Million? I didn't think so. How many phone calls does your family make on average? How about the place you work at? Just the records of who made what phone call to who would be in the multi-terabytes per day for the whole country.
This has been proposed in many different forms in different many places (ranging from small companies to governments) and it is shut down just because it is too expensive to maintain. You're talking about storage, I'm talking about bandwidth, how many pipes do you need and how big do they need to be to catch-up every day on the continuous stream of data. Think about stock exchanges, that's the type of infrastructure you would need. Now multiply that by the ratio of companies on the stock exchange against the citizens in the country.
Of course they're getting paid by the content providers. Not necessarily money, but MS has an ad-revenue part (MSN, MSNBC), a search-revenue part (Live) and a media-revenue part (MSNBC, Zune). They never sold a Windows Media license directly to the 'end-user', they do that through their partners. If you buy a HP or Dell laptop, most likely you're going to find a Windows Media OS on there but they only make about $3-13 on that license. If they can make a 'deal' with News Corp. where they gain $1,000,000 in benefits on the several services they provide for them, you can permit screwing over a few hundred customers.
It's really difficult to find a decent and working MCU (Multipoint Control Unit) that's both free and allows to see all participants at the same time. Asterisk has a solution, but only one participant can be seen at the same time. There is Caltech's Java client as mentioned above and VLVC but that's not really complete or working.
I settled on using OpenMeetings (www.openmeetings.net). It's FOSS, based on Java, Flash and Red5 and it works really well.
There is a lot of protectionism going around. Both in Europe and the US, small farmers get subsidies because they can't compete with the cheaper products from bigger farmers elsewhere (not necessarily China but usually out-of-state farmers). This in turn makes it that they don't make any effort to expand to match or exceed the possibilities of the other farmers since they get the money for free anyway.
In this world, you'll have to match your bigger competitors somehow. Whether it's usability, customer service or quality, it can be done since all the little businesses aren't dead yet and every year there are new businesses opened but giving money because they're small just makes them more complacent in general.
I don't know, go into the SVN or CVS repo and find out yourself. Luckily you're not using closed source where you don't even know if the code does it's work nor do you know the programmer.
And I heard the 'we get to sue x if we buy from x' but when was the last time you sued Microsoft because of your system being part of a botnet? Or Oracle because their database corrupted. Heck, it's difficult enough to sue or set responsible PeopleSoft or SAP for the defective product they (after 3 years of implementation and about 200 contractors) don't/can't deliver, imagine something you DID get.
Actually you're wrong, both AMD and Intel emulate an x86 (CISC) on a RISC processor. I'm just being pedantic, I know...
There is little difference between an emulator and an interpreter. From a CS standpoint, the emulator emulates a processor or process (eg. by creating a virtual machine) so that instructions given can be run within the emulator, the emulator in itself is a host. An interpreter interprets instructions and gives them through to the host processor for execution, the interpreter in itself is not a host. So Wine is not an emulator, it's an interpreter. Programmatically, an emulator can be ported to different architectures than the intended software was made to run on.
According to the dictionary, an emulator in computing reproduces the function or action of a different computer or software system, an interpreter is a program that can analyze and execute a program line by line. In the fuzzy response here, I would consider it an interpreter since it doesn't reproduce the function (or lack thereof) or action of a full Windows system, it analyzes the commands given to it and executes them in userland Linux.
You could always switch to electrical energy for the vehicles that maintain the sites and transport/dig up the uranium. You would build one reactor that is not carbon neutral and then you'd be able to power enough vehicles to build all your other reactors fully carbon neutral.
You know, I have a digital certificate that does that for me. It automatically signs my e-mail and 'smart' filters and e-mail clients know that non-signed e-mail from me is not to be trusted as much.
Get your free personal certificate and if 2 people have certificates, e-mail gets encrypted between you! There are a number of providers that give them.
Heat = Wattage which is Voltage * Current. Lowering your voltage and subsequently heightening your current in equal portions shouldn't be a problem. Or do you think Americans have double size wires in the streets/homes compared to Europeans? I think we'd all have 10,000V in our homes if that were so.
Hey, hookers cost money, Spitzer spent over $15,000 on one, $1000/hour, who do you think is going to pay for that?
What if you can't or don't want to pay? It's unlawful to deny first aid services based on somebody's ability to pay.
Apparently the only person that thinks non-commercial Linux development is a bust is the reporter from ZD Asia. The interviewed thinks about it totally different although 3 questions border on that subject and one is even somewhat insulting, Steve keeps hammering that this is a non-profit and they've been doing it like that for 15 years. There is no "problem" here as the interviewer makes it out to be.
I've had the following tool in my collection for a long time: http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html
It's quite easy, boot up the computer from that disk and you can reset the passwords in a few minutes. Linux-based too for that matter.
FTFA:
The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer. It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for evidence on site.
Apparently just some tools-on-a-disk. If it can bypass the encrypted file systems and other secure stuff, then there is a problem and the so-called "NSA-key" is not just myth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY).
What most people ask in my environment about the iMac's (from the G5 onwards but especially the new batch): where is the computer? since they expect a big bulky or at least some type of tower where you put the CPU in. I have a dead iMac G5 next to a same size dead LCD screen in my office and sometimes one of the passer-by's ask: if you're throwing away those monitors, can I have them.
I like the new iMac's for desktop environments. They take up less space, are quite powerful and they're also easy to repair (3 screws gives access to everything).
Although I don't think Apple sells them retail, they are Apple branded (usually the Apple logo next to the Western Digital or IBM/Fujitsu logo.
Scientist are still looking for several elements on the periodic table. The 'inventor' of the periodic table, Mendelev noticed that elements ordered on the table have certain mathematical properties against each other and thus calculated where certain elements should appear and what some of their properties should be (so they know what to look for). Of course, some (especially the super-heavy elements) are synthesized (although they might appear naturally but are not yet discovered) highly radioactive and some of them have very short half-lives (hours, seconds or even milliseconds).
Either get a dog or an alarm system. Criminals don't like either and it's quite a deterrent for them, they'll rather skip to another neighborhood than messing with it. Alarm systems need to be armed though so you'll have to keep it up, but once it goes off, the criminal will run. It only costs $10-50/month and takes a big chunk out of your homeowners (depending on your neighborhood) and can possibly be brought into your taxes if you have a home office. If you're a DIY: http://www.smarthome.com/alarm.html, if not, go to the big boys like ADT or Brinks.
I work at a University with a large medical site/hospital/research and I've worked in several businesses that have to have HIPAA or SoX compliance. The laws state and the legal advisors make sure you know this: if your data was encrypted and then lost disclosure is not mandatory and thus the agreement of the employer then takes over, if you disclose it anyway, you lose your job.
Another example: If you have a database, it is sufficient to only protect/encrypt one of the (i think it's five) identifiers to be compliant. For example if you have name, first name, address, ssn and birthdate, you only would have to encrypt the ssn to be safe. Although in another database or even table you can have partial ssn, customer number and credit card number, you encrypt credit card number and your safe. If both are compromised neither have to be disclosed if both tables were not used in the same application and thus had different access controls. Anyone with some database knowledge of course knows that as superuser (what you're usually hacked as) you can easily join the tables to get a more complete picture.
I know of places that have lost, have been hacked into or have misplaced thousands of data records including credit card numbers etc. and have not needed to disclose simply because they used 'some form of encryption'. That the encryption/decryption keys could've been compromised at the same time or at another time is none of their concern, they abide by the law.
Actually, it would be better to wipe their hard drive clean since then they would be directly impacted and see the loss caused by their stupidity. I already heard from users: yeah, I know I have a virus/trojan but it doesn't really do anything bad to my computer and that virus scanner makes my computer slower so I'll leave it there.
Also, it would give us geeks some extra income and we would have the opportunity to load Ubuntu on their machines.
And how do bigiron servers do it? Trust me, I've worked with bigiron and there are several solutions:
Some type of virtualization, partitioning or jails, and you can emulate a cluster of machines with minimal performance impact. The 'host' doesn't necessarily need to be upgraded frequently since it's very minimal in function (load a kernel into a processor).
You have your monthly/yearly maintenance that takes everything offline at 3 am and upgrades it if necessary. It's not unusual to see those things 3-5 major versions behind though depending on the work. Just like in Linux, a lot of it is modularized so much, that you don't have to take the whole thing offline to upgrade parts of it. If you have a somewhat decent vendor, they'll backport recent patches to kernel modules to your version and you can update.
100% is not possible with a single machine, even if you want it, there is no way that you will foresee any updates, patches or just plain people doing something stupid or stuff breaking. Any modern single server (mainframe) costing more than a mere $100,000 is most likely a machine consisting out of several machines already.
And there wouldn't be any spammers if there weren't any prospects for them.
Stupid people are the cause of a lot of limitations, problems and laws in our society. Not only causing handicapped people problems but everybody else, raising costs for everyone.
If we had a way to weed out the stupid, greedy people from society we wouldn't have a credit crisis, we wouldn't have spammers or junk mail.
Actually I know my servers have been in 50 degrees Celsius environment for the past few years, nothing bad happened yet to them (not even a hard drive crash)