You're one of those damn HTML5 lubbers, aren't you? \~
Don't know yet, there's nothing to lub. Not much available in the real world to try with HTML5... ask again in two years. The lub may be hawt, or it may be like lub with a drunken frat boy (lots of tears and shortcomings and stains that won't wash out).
But the point stands: whether HTML5 is good or bad is pretty much irrelevant to the inarguable fact that Flash is a security mess. Even if HTML5 turns out to be even worse, that doesn't make the current state of affairs with Flash acceptable. Adobe needs to get its act together, regardless of their competition's CERT alert count. The only bug counts their dev team should care about are their own.
If a Chevy catches fire 20% of the time when you start it, and a Chrysler catches fire 10% of the time when you start it, that still doesn't make Chrysler OK or safe.
This is why Apple no longer ships Flash pre-installed, and why they do their own PDF readers. Regardless of any tiffs (or.TIFFs, har! see what I did there?) between Adobe and Apple, I'm sure that Adobe wants its products preinstalled in OSX. Even through its contentious history with Adobe, Apple has preinstalled Flash for many software releases now because it made business sense to do so. It no longer does.
Recent trends show that Adobe is the most readily-exploited software vendor (per US-CERT). Critical flaws are being discovered faster than operating system installer "golden images" can be put through the update-certification-release cycle. Any version of Flash or Acrobat/Reader that is incorporated into an OS golden image will almost certainly be vulnerable by the time a system with that OS installed reaches a customer. You're going to have to update the moment you're out-of-box, so why pre-install something you're going to have to patch anyway (assuming you patch at all)? And Apple can't autopatch it... their Software Update only updates Apple products (i.e. products which they actually have the legal right to patch).
And, of course, the headlines would (and do) read "Macs being exploited" instead of "Adobe being exploited". Apple doesn't want that, and is in a position to do something about it.
Do we perhaps understand why Apple does some of the things it does a little better now? Do we perhaps understand why Microsoft doesn't include Flash/Reader as part of its OS? Does Adobe need to get its goddamned act together before they start throwing rocks at OS vendors?
The US government is sufficiently large that there isn't a single entity which can be called "the government". One part may well be genuinely interested in protecting privacy, while another part is doing its best to have the Fourth Amendment repealed. Schizophrenic? Oh yes. It's also part of why trying to make plans on what the regulatory environment will be like in four years a complete crapshoot.
There's also the matter than if the government acquires the ability to specifically regulate privacy on Internet sites (above and beyond the more basic "your Terms of Service say X, you did Y, you are in material breach of contract" which applies to all businesses), this forms precedent that the government has the power to regulate other things... content, access, reporting. Only the DHS and other jackboots would consider this a good thing.
No new law or government entity is needed to enforce compliance with privacy statements. Facebook can be held liable for violating its Terms of Service, and fraud on the basis of saying "we don't do this" when they in fact do (and then profiting from it). We don't need a Department of Enforcing Internet Stuff; we just need a judge, a jury, a plaintiff, and a court date.
It already existed, along with workers already here
A huge tax exemption was given to Tesla to persuade them not to leave
Point 1 means you don't have to build the plant, get permits, etc., you just have to move in. It also means there is a workforce with relevant skills and who had been managing the cost of living (either by being long-term homeowners or living in by-local-standards moderately priced housing in the East Bay), and which can be reemployed without the burden of the UAW agreements which Tesla is not bound to. Both of those conditions are significant.
Part 2 is because without tax credits and other subsidies, it is FAR too expensive here in California to do a manufacturing business. The regulatory burden here is very high, as are taxes and fees (even if you form your corporation as, say a Nevada or Delaware corp, you're still paying 9%+ sales tax, very high non-income-related taxes, along with other fees). It just plain makes no financial sense to manufacture anything in California without either heavy tax relief or for which the cost of transportation exceeds the increased tax/regulatory burden. Those subsidies exist because otherwise Tesla would have been a high-visibility spotlight on the harsh business climate for manufacturers of physical goods here, and nobody in the state wanted that embarrassment. It's hard to claim to be a high-tech capital when the best and brightest are fleeing to places that want them more and tax them less. (If I ever decide to take a shot at manufacturing the product ideas I have in my head, it will absolutely not be in California.)
Several of my relatives worked in the NUMMI plant before it was NUMMI (it was Ford at the time). A bit of family history there.
I've had periods of unemployment in my past which were many months long (boom and bust). I've had to live on my own on under 20,000 a year. I've been in situations where I've had to sell my stuff to pay rent and buy food. But I've never been on the dole, even though I was thoroughly "entitled" to do so.
Yeah, I know how to be poor. I've done it. But somehow, I knew how to be poor without drawing welfare, food stamps, unemployment or other subsidies. I don't reach into others' pockets.
Last year, between state, local, federal, social security and other mandatory taxes, plus sales taxes, fuel taxes, various surcharges and fees on fuel, utilities, car registration, property taxes, and other unavoidable expenses, 45% of my income went to the government. And people say I should pay MORE?
It's not a crime to be rich, for whatever "rich" means, even though people with more "want" than "earn" in them like to claim otherwise. If you have one more dollar than I do, does that make you "rich" and a fair target for the abuse that gets heaped upon anyone capable of making more money? If I have one more dollar than-- oh, wait, I already know the answer to this one.
There is as assumption that if you are "rich" then you by necessity screwed someone over to get that way, which is just plain wrong. There is also the assumption that if you're "poor" it's someone else's fault, usually the corporate straw-man. That too is BS; personal responsibility is not income-dependent. Yes, somewhere there are mustache-twirling slumlords, but they are a minority. Yes, somewhere there are poor people who would be better off but for an act of malevolence, but that too is a minority. You can't blame Bill Gates if you drop out of school. You can't blame Steve Jobs if you take a degree in liberal arts and find out *shock* nobody will pay you a six-figure salary for being an expert in Turkish history or for mastering classical guitar.
But the moment that the claim is made that the "rich" should have money taken away from them and given to the "not-rich", SOLELY because they have money that others want, or a claim is made that there is an upper limit to how much you should be allowed to have before everything else is confiscated in the name of "fairness", yeah. There's a word for that.
Can the argument be summed up as "from each according to their means to each according to their needs"?
I've heard that somewhere before...
I'm getting so tired of people saying that "fair" means "you pay, I benefit". Almost half of Americans pay NO federal income tax at all (http://www.businessinsider.com/only-half-americans-actually-pay-income-tax-2010-4), and these are the ones screaming loudest that the ones who DO pay taxes should pay even more... with that money to be paid to (you guessed it) the people who already pay nothing, directly or indirectly.
"I want your money, I don't want to have to work for it, so I voted that you have to give me your money. That's my definition of 'fair' and 'democratic'."
Maybe it's time I looked into creating an overseas-based tax structure for myself.
It's the Netherlands. European satellite TV is synonymous with ku-band, 10.7-12.7 GHz.
The tech being described would be frequency-agnostic; the big question is how many elements it can manage. With higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths, the ability to phase-shift becomes coarser and coarser (the time-delay adjustment needed is measured in picosecond increments at 10GHz), and doing so digitally is not the easiest task. If the phasing adjustments are done digitally, the "dedicated hardware" approach that the professor seems to be using would be the solution to the expense that would be involved using off-the-shelf discrete picosecond/femtosecond oscillators. It would also allow for a large number of antenna elements to be managed; it would scale well and allow for a very high-gain array made of (potentially) hundreds of elements.
Of course, there are non-digital means of adjusting delays. Something as simple as having multiple traces of slightly-differing lengths connecting each antenna element to the receiver, then selecting the trace of the desired length, would do the trick (assuming the trace-to-trace crosstalk problem is eliminated), though this would mean a relatively coarse increment of adjustments and a smallish number of elements, and therefore coarse beam steering/lower gain. It would also be incredibly cheap, and if the granularity is still fine enough to achieve the steering accuracy needed, and the lower number of elements provides the needed gain... win!
Antenna elements in an array are usually about 1/2 wavelength apart. L-band, 1ghz to 2ghz, has a wavelength of 20 to 30cm. So... half that, assuming 1/2 wave separation.
It's not all about signal strength. Sensitivity these days is rarely an issue; the electronics in the receiver are excellent. Of greater relevance are polarization, rejection of off-axis noise, directivity, and the ability to reject signals from adjacent bands. There are also issues of setup difficulty, and this is what the primary focus of the design in question is.
Aiming a dish antenna is a chore, and high winds which shake a parabolic dish can cause signal strength to fluctuate dramatically. An electronically controlled phased array can, by introducing delays to various antenna elements, "steer" itself and lock onto a satellite with great accuracy (within a few degrees of the direction the array is aimed). A small antenna, perfectly aimed, will outperform a larger antenna poorly aimed, and if the antenna's controller can aim itself without physical adjustments many thousands of times per second, wind and a... coarse job of aiming the antenna are non-factors.
A military example: PAVE-PAWS, a 435Mhz missile detection array used by the US Air Force. The antennas in question are made of thousands of smaller elements (a single dipole element at 435MHz is about 35cm long), do not move, but the transmitted radar beam and the reception-aiming can be extremely precise. The more elements you have, the narrower the beam but the higher the gain.
L-band, commonly used by companies like satellite TV providers, is 1 to 2 GHz. An array of 16 log-periodic (wideband) antenna elements would therefore be 60cm square. A 4-element array would be 30cm square. Pretty compact, and if it gets rid of the most common cause of poor signal strength (a poorly-aimed dish), it's a win.
Chris what is your non-biased take on Comcast forging TCP reset packets and terrible quality HD?
Because guys that run DNS servers are obviously the guys who are responsible for video quality-of-service. Same field, and Comcast has only a couple of engineers running their entire network. I bet Chris also is responsible for designing their logos and what's in their cafeterias and whether the cable installers show up on time.
The topic is DNSSEC, not bandwidth caps or video compression or network traffic filtering.
I would have thought that having a primary source, an engineer relevant to the discussion, was welcome. Instead, it's an excuse to get out the haters. IT guys complain about how they're the ones that take the heat for corporate decisions which they don't control, but the moment it's someone else's IT guy, that person gets the heat for corporate decisions which they don't control. Nice consistency there. What's YOUR company, so we know who YOU are a "shill" for?
I'd be surprised if we hear from Chris again. I know I wouldn't come back. Screw Slashdotters, they don't want information or answers, they want scapegoats and straw men.
Whether Comcast, EFF or the Nazis use DNSSEC is irrelevant to the merits and flaws of DNSSEC. Whether Comcast uses DNSSEC is irrelevant to whether they use ad-readirectors for NXDOMAIN results.
By the way, I think I worked on the DNS server and service that Comcast is using for this, at my previous job. I guess that makes me a shill too. But I'll be damned if I'm going to share anything useful about it, even things that aren't under NDA, to Slashdot.
If something got by an anti-virus app, and managed an infection, a rootkit is almost certainly one of the first things downloaded by the malware (assuming that the malware is botnet-focused rather than just simple vandalism). The initial infection is almost never the one that carries the payload (the software that the person who deployed the malware really wants to run); the usual sequence is infect--rootkit--get instructions from a website/IRC channel--download payload--wait for instructions to execute payload.
So even if you clean the initial infector, the rootkit may still be there, which your AV software may or may not detect. If not, the downloaded payloads have a good chance of being undetected, in which case they appear as just another service or startup item. Payloads seldom do anything exploitative, in that they're doing ordinary appish things (sending emails, reading files, uploading data, visiting a website or IRC channel), and thus can be difficult to detect just from their behavior.
Therefore, if someone's PC is infected, you don't know what other goodies have been downloaded since the initial infection. Nuke it from orbit,t hat's the only way to be sure.
(boot from a Linux CD, mount your hard drives read-only, back off your data, scan that data, then reinstall your OS and apps including an initial reformat. Anything else and you might miss something.)
When it's a business, it's whatever works best. Choosing idealism over pragmatism is not something you should do when other people's jobs are affected (unless your ideals include "others are obligated to take the risks my personal ideals dictate"). If the closed-source solution is objectively better, you use it. If the open-source solution is objectively better, you use it. If it's objectively a tie (which should almost never actually occur, but...), then AND ONLY THEN should idealism be the deciding factor, and even then the question becomes "whose ideals". You're apparently not the boss, so why should your ideals trump those of your boss or the business owner?
Customer contact management is important. It's no place to be messing around. There is no problem with FOSS that is the best in its category, or if total cost of ownership including licenses/support is too high for commercial software. However, FOSS doesn't get a free pass if it isn't rock-solid, usable by the people who have to live with it, is interoperable with other software, and supportable.
Make your evaluation based upon facts. If you can't make a fact-based, backed-by-the-numbers argument in favor of Plone, you shouldn't be advocating it.
And vice versa. The horror stories I could tell about Jira/Confluence...
So let me see if I have the objections correctly summarized. For nonspecific values of "you":
I can send all the spam I want! No, you can't. Spam is illegal in many places, and is against the Terms of Service of every ISP I can think of. If you sign an agreement to abide by the ToS, you DO it. Is your word worth nothing?
The ISPs will use this as an excuse to block P2P! ISPs already CAN block P2P. Net neutrality is not law, and every ISP I can think of has a provision in their ToS saying you are not allowed to use their service to violate copyright or break unsolicited commercial email regulations. I am also quite certain that any net neutrality law which is put in place will allow for blocking of illegal activity once identified as such, so don't look to net neutrality as license to break laws on any given ISP's network. This isn't about P2P or DCMA enforcement (that's a separate fight); this is about botnets and UCE and being a malware vector and compliance with the agreement you signed taking full responsibility for the traffic your PC sends out. See previous reference to "is your word worth nothing".
ISPs can use this to enforce DCMA! ISPs already CAN and DO enforce the DCMA. This changes nothing.
ISPs can use this to block political speech! If your ISP is in fact explicitly blocking political speech, you've got bigger problems than botnets and accessing port 25. In that case, you need to be bombing their offices and that of the government which is directing the blocking, not spending time complaining on Slashdot. Get to it. The world is watching. Vive le revolution!
ISPs are all stupid and staffed by monkeys! No. They are not. There are idiots in every business, but to blanket-assume incompetence is wrong on moral AND factual bases. I can certainly say with confidence that there are more idiot users than idiot admins. That doesn't mean I get to assume everyone out there is completely incompetent to run their lives. After all, I'm not Nancy Pelosi.
ISPs will always get it wrong! No. They won't. There may be false positives, and yes that's a problem. However, there will be many more accurate positives. Infected PCs are widespread. Again, you can't assume incompetence. Most of the PCs quarantined will, in fact, be infected.
I don't like authority! You're not the boss of me! Grow up. When you affect other people, when you harm other people (such as filling their inboxes with child porn and becoming a vector for further malware infections), someone IS the boss of you and has every right to slap you down, especially if you do so willingly. Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my mailer queue.
I have the right to be a spammer! You have the right to die in a fire.
Not really and Slashdot really highlights it because far too often people who disagree with the poster will mod that post down for no other reason other than that. The reason why/. doesn't have much spam is because there is no market, how many people on Slashdot would want to buy P3n15 3nh@nc3rz?
...because Bill Gates wants to make his Linden dollar purchases for "Gorean" equipment deductible?
...because Silverlight will be EXL-compatible?
...because Microsoft is replacing C# with LSL?
...because it's a talent grab in the customer service department?
...because IE10 will be based upon the Second Life Viewer?
...because Phillip Rosedale has a screenshot of Steve Ballmer's avatar in a slinky red dress that he will release if Microsoft doesn't pony up the cash?
Rather than a blanket "you can send anything you want anywhere you want/you can send nothing to anywhere" switch, a finer-grained constrained set of permissions may be the way to go. Specifically:
Commonly-requested data such as location and phone number are sent through specific APIs that ONLY send the requested info, and cannot send any other data. This data is sent not directly to whatever server, but to servers at the network provider, and the app provider picks them up from the network provider. This prevents arbitrary data from being sent when the claim that it is only a specific piece of data, allows "bad" apps (defined by deception, prohibited use or incomplete disclosure) to be cut off at the network provider when discovered, and allows vetting of outgoing data to ensure it meets the claimed destination.
Transaction logs must be kept and be accessible to allow a user to see what's going out. Yes, most end users won't be able to make sense of the logs. But these logs could be uploaded to a security software provider for analysis, and the results presented in an understandable manner. "DroidGameApp: Microphone activated and streamed, GPS info, phone number sent to www.dhs.gov"
Information collection by ads should be governed by a different set of permissions than the app presenting the ads. Ad-supported apps are fine, but the user should know what ads are doing on the network independent of the app.
And if an app provider doesn't like the light shone on their activities... that's a pretty good indicator right there.
The issue with this is that most people will either choose locations that are well-known landmarks, or which they are associated with. This vastly reduces the potential search space for a password based upon a physical location. But even if you choose a location at random... Let's pull a number out of the air: let's suppose there are 100 million buildings in the United States that represent potential candidate "geokeys". That's what, a 27-bit key? How long would it take to exhaustively brute-force a 27-bit keyspace?
The other issue is that you now have a dependency upon the map-display. If it ever changes (new satellite imagery, the Taco Bell you use as your key moves across the street to a new building), or the map-server is down, you can't get in without some sort of time-consuming (and itself potentially hackable) recovery method.
Nice idea on paper, and far better than choosing a random word that appears in/usr/share/dict/words (480 thousand entries on my installation)... but still weak compared to even a 6-byte password composed entirely of ASCII 33-96 chosen at random (64 possible values per character, 64 = 2^6, 6*6 = 36, keyspace = 2^36 = 69 billion possibilities).
Slashdot Mirror
You're one of those damn HTML5 lubbers, aren't you? \~
Don't know yet, there's nothing to lub. Not much available in the real world to try with HTML5... ask again in two years. The lub may be hawt, or it may be like lub with a drunken frat boy (lots of tears and shortcomings and stains that won't wash out).
But the point stands: whether HTML5 is good or bad is pretty much irrelevant to the inarguable fact that Flash is a security mess. Even if HTML5 turns out to be even worse, that doesn't make the current state of affairs with Flash acceptable. Adobe needs to get its act together, regardless of their competition's CERT alert count. The only bug counts their dev team should care about are their own.
If a Chevy catches fire 20% of the time when you start it, and a Chrysler catches fire 10% of the time when you start it, that still doesn't make Chrysler OK or safe.
The sins of Flash are not forgiven by the sins of HTML5.
This is why Apple no longer ships Flash pre-installed, and why they do their own PDF readers. Regardless of any tiffs (or .TIFFs, har! see what I did there?) between Adobe and Apple, I'm sure that Adobe wants its products preinstalled in OSX. Even through its contentious history with Adobe, Apple has preinstalled Flash for many software releases now because it made business sense to do so. It no longer does.
Recent trends show that Adobe is the most readily-exploited software vendor (per US-CERT). Critical flaws are being discovered faster than operating system installer "golden images" can be put through the update-certification-release cycle. Any version of Flash or Acrobat/Reader that is incorporated into an OS golden image will almost certainly be vulnerable by the time a system with that OS installed reaches a customer. You're going to have to update the moment you're out-of-box, so why pre-install something you're going to have to patch anyway (assuming you patch at all)? And Apple can't autopatch it... their Software Update only updates Apple products (i.e. products which they actually have the legal right to patch).
And, of course, the headlines would (and do) read "Macs being exploited" instead of "Adobe being exploited". Apple doesn't want that, and is in a position to do something about it.
Do we perhaps understand why Apple does some of the things it does a little better now? Do we perhaps understand why Microsoft doesn't include Flash/Reader as part of its OS? Does Adobe need to get its goddamned act together before they start throwing rocks at OS vendors?
(Larry Niven reference)
Fyunch(click)
"Hey, what happened to our backscatter van?"
"Well, we drove by a container full of parabolic satellite dishes, and our input stages were fried."
It's a dream I have...
Part of me agrees with you, but part of me doesn't.
The US government is sufficiently large that there isn't a single entity which can be called "the government". One part may well be genuinely interested in protecting privacy, while another part is doing its best to have the Fourth Amendment repealed. Schizophrenic? Oh yes. It's also part of why trying to make plans on what the regulatory environment will be like in four years a complete crapshoot.
There's also the matter than if the government acquires the ability to specifically regulate privacy on Internet sites (above and beyond the more basic "your Terms of Service say X, you did Y, you are in material breach of contract" which applies to all businesses), this forms precedent that the government has the power to regulate other things... content, access, reporting. Only the DHS and other jackboots would consider this a good thing.
No new law or government entity is needed to enforce compliance with privacy statements. Facebook can be held liable for violating its Terms of Service, and fraud on the basis of saying "we don't do this" when they in fact do (and then profiting from it). We don't need a Department of Enforcing Internet Stuff; we just need a judge, a jury, a plaintiff, and a court date.
Point 1 means you don't have to build the plant, get permits, etc., you just have to move in. It also means there is a workforce with relevant skills and who had been managing the cost of living (either by being long-term homeowners or living in by-local-standards moderately priced housing in the East Bay), and which can be reemployed without the burden of the UAW agreements which Tesla is not bound to. Both of those conditions are significant.
Part 2 is because without tax credits and other subsidies, it is FAR too expensive here in California to do a manufacturing business. The regulatory burden here is very high, as are taxes and fees (even if you form your corporation as, say a Nevada or Delaware corp, you're still paying 9%+ sales tax, very high non-income-related taxes, along with other fees). It just plain makes no financial sense to manufacture anything in California without either heavy tax relief or for which the cost of transportation exceeds the increased tax/regulatory burden. Those subsidies exist because otherwise Tesla would have been a high-visibility spotlight on the harsh business climate for manufacturers of physical goods here, and nobody in the state wanted that embarrassment. It's hard to claim to be a high-tech capital when the best and brightest are fleeing to places that want them more and tax them less. (If I ever decide to take a shot at manufacturing the product ideas I have in my head, it will absolutely not be in California.)
Several of my relatives worked in the NUMMI plant before it was NUMMI (it was Ford at the time). A bit of family history there.
I've had periods of unemployment in my past which were many months long (boom and bust). I've had to live on my own on under 20,000 a year. I've been in situations where I've had to sell my stuff to pay rent and buy food. But I've never been on the dole, even though I was thoroughly "entitled" to do so.
Yeah, I know how to be poor. I've done it. But somehow, I knew how to be poor without drawing welfare, food stamps, unemployment or other subsidies. I don't reach into others' pockets.
Last year, between state, local, federal, social security and other mandatory taxes, plus sales taxes, fuel taxes, various surcharges and fees on fuel, utilities, car registration, property taxes, and other unavoidable expenses, 45% of my income went to the government. And people say I should pay MORE?
It's not a crime to be rich, for whatever "rich" means, even though people with more "want" than "earn" in them like to claim otherwise. If you have one more dollar than I do, does that make you "rich" and a fair target for the abuse that gets heaped upon anyone capable of making more money? If I have one more dollar than-- oh, wait, I already know the answer to this one.
There is as assumption that if you are "rich" then you by necessity screwed someone over to get that way, which is just plain wrong. There is also the assumption that if you're "poor" it's someone else's fault, usually the corporate straw-man. That too is BS; personal responsibility is not income-dependent. Yes, somewhere there are mustache-twirling slumlords, but they are a minority. Yes, somewhere there are poor people who would be better off but for an act of malevolence, but that too is a minority. You can't blame Bill Gates if you drop out of school. You can't blame Steve Jobs if you take a degree in liberal arts and find out *shock* nobody will pay you a six-figure salary for being an expert in Turkish history or for mastering classical guitar.
But the moment that the claim is made that the "rich" should have money taken away from them and given to the "not-rich", SOLELY because they have money that others want, or a claim is made that there is an upper limit to how much you should be allowed to have before everything else is confiscated in the name of "fairness", yeah. There's a word for that.
I've heard that somewhere before...
I'm getting so tired of people saying that "fair" means "you pay, I benefit". Almost half of Americans pay NO federal income tax at all (http://www.businessinsider.com/only-half-americans-actually-pay-income-tax-2010-4), and these are the ones screaming loudest that the ones who DO pay taxes should pay even more... with that money to be paid to (you guessed it) the people who already pay nothing, directly or indirectly.
"I want your money, I don't want to have to work for it, so I voted that you have to give me your money. That's my definition of 'fair' and 'democratic'."
Maybe it's time I looked into creating an overseas-based tax structure for myself.
It's the Netherlands. European satellite TV is synonymous with ku-band, 10.7-12.7 GHz.
The tech being described would be frequency-agnostic; the big question is how many elements it can manage. With higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths, the ability to phase-shift becomes coarser and coarser (the time-delay adjustment needed is measured in picosecond increments at 10GHz), and doing so digitally is not the easiest task. If the phasing adjustments are done digitally, the "dedicated hardware" approach that the professor seems to be using would be the solution to the expense that would be involved using off-the-shelf discrete picosecond/femtosecond oscillators. It would also allow for a large number of antenna elements to be managed; it would scale well and allow for a very high-gain array made of (potentially) hundreds of elements.
Of course, there are non-digital means of adjusting delays. Something as simple as having multiple traces of slightly-differing lengths connecting each antenna element to the receiver, then selecting the trace of the desired length, would do the trick (assuming the trace-to-trace crosstalk problem is eliminated), though this would mean a relatively coarse increment of adjustments and a smallish number of elements, and therefore coarse beam steering/lower gain. It would also be incredibly cheap, and if the granularity is still fine enough to achieve the steering accuracy needed, and the lower number of elements provides the needed gain... win!
Antenna elements in an array are usually about 1/2 wavelength apart. L-band, 1ghz to 2ghz, has a wavelength of 20 to 30cm. So... half that, assuming 1/2 wave separation.
A collection of links on antenna arrays at a ham radio antenna design site: http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Antennas/Array/
It's not all about signal strength. Sensitivity these days is rarely an issue; the electronics in the receiver are excellent. Of greater relevance are polarization, rejection of off-axis noise, directivity, and the ability to reject signals from adjacent bands. There are also issues of setup difficulty, and this is what the primary focus of the design in question is.
Aiming a dish antenna is a chore, and high winds which shake a parabolic dish can cause signal strength to fluctuate dramatically. An electronically controlled phased array can, by introducing delays to various antenna elements, "steer" itself and lock onto a satellite with great accuracy (within a few degrees of the direction the array is aimed). A small antenna, perfectly aimed, will outperform a larger antenna poorly aimed, and if the antenna's controller can aim itself without physical adjustments many thousands of times per second, wind and a... coarse job of aiming the antenna are non-factors.
A military example: PAVE-PAWS, a 435Mhz missile detection array used by the US Air Force. The antennas in question are made of thousands of smaller elements (a single dipole element at 435MHz is about 35cm long), do not move, but the transmitted radar beam and the reception-aiming can be extremely precise. The more elements you have, the narrower the beam but the higher the gain.
L-band, commonly used by companies like satellite TV providers, is 1 to 2 GHz. An array of 16 log-periodic (wideband) antenna elements would therefore be 60cm square. A 4-element array would be 30cm square. Pretty compact, and if it gets rid of the most common cause of poor signal strength (a poorly-aimed dish), it's a win.
Chris what is your non-biased take on Comcast forging TCP reset packets and terrible quality HD?
Because guys that run DNS servers are obviously the guys who are responsible for video quality-of-service. Same field, and Comcast has only a couple of engineers running their entire network. I bet Chris also is responsible for designing their logos and what's in their cafeterias and whether the cable installers show up on time.
The topic is DNSSEC, not bandwidth caps or video compression or network traffic filtering.
I would have thought that having a primary source, an engineer relevant to the discussion, was welcome. Instead, it's an excuse to get out the haters. IT guys complain about how they're the ones that take the heat for corporate decisions which they don't control, but the moment it's someone else's IT guy, that person gets the heat for corporate decisions which they don't control. Nice consistency there. What's YOUR company, so we know who YOU are a "shill" for?
I'd be surprised if we hear from Chris again. I know I wouldn't come back. Screw Slashdotters, they don't want information or answers, they want scapegoats and straw men.
Whether Comcast, EFF or the Nazis use DNSSEC is irrelevant to the merits and flaws of DNSSEC. Whether Comcast uses DNSSEC is irrelevant to whether they use ad-readirectors for NXDOMAIN results.
By the way, I think I worked on the DNS server and service that Comcast is using for this, at my previous job. I guess that makes me a shill too. But I'll be damned if I'm going to share anything useful about it, even things that aren't under NDA, to Slashdot.
1. Reformat/reinstall.
If something got by an anti-virus app, and managed an infection, a rootkit is almost certainly one of the first things downloaded by the malware (assuming that the malware is botnet-focused rather than just simple vandalism). The initial infection is almost never the one that carries the payload (the software that the person who deployed the malware really wants to run); the usual sequence is infect--rootkit--get instructions from a website/IRC channel--download payload--wait for instructions to execute payload.
So even if you clean the initial infector, the rootkit may still be there, which your AV software may or may not detect. If not, the downloaded payloads have a good chance of being undetected, in which case they appear as just another service or startup item. Payloads seldom do anything exploitative, in that they're doing ordinary appish things (sending emails, reading files, uploading data, visiting a website or IRC channel), and thus can be difficult to detect just from their behavior.
Therefore, if someone's PC is infected, you don't know what other goodies have been downloaded since the initial infection. Nuke it from orbit,t hat's the only way to be sure.
(boot from a Linux CD, mount your hard drives read-only, back off your data, scan that data, then reinstall your OS and apps including an initial reformat. Anything else and you might miss something.)
When it's a business, it's whatever works best. Choosing idealism over pragmatism is not something you should do when other people's jobs are affected (unless your ideals include "others are obligated to take the risks my personal ideals dictate"). If the closed-source solution is objectively better, you use it. If the open-source solution is objectively better, you use it. If it's objectively a tie (which should almost never actually occur, but...), then AND ONLY THEN should idealism be the deciding factor, and even then the question becomes "whose ideals". You're apparently not the boss, so why should your ideals trump those of your boss or the business owner?
Customer contact management is important. It's no place to be messing around. There is no problem with FOSS that is the best in its category, or if total cost of ownership including licenses/support is too high for commercial software. However, FOSS doesn't get a free pass if it isn't rock-solid, usable by the people who have to live with it, is interoperable with other software, and supportable.
Make your evaluation based upon facts. If you can't make a fact-based, backed-by-the-numbers argument in favor of Plone, you shouldn't be advocating it.
And vice versa. The horror stories I could tell about Jira/Confluence...
Or the size...
It's referred to as "rubber hose cryptography".
So let me see if I have the objections correctly summarized. For nonspecific values of "you":
Does that cover it all?
Microsoft doesn't have anything anybody wants to emulate.
Not really and Slashdot really highlights it because far too often people who disagree with the poster will mod that post down for no other reason other than that. The reason why /. doesn't have much spam is because there is no market, how many people on Slashdot would want to buy P3n15 3nh@nc3rz?
You answer your own question.
...because Bill Gates wants to make his Linden dollar purchases for "Gorean" equipment deductible?
Rather than a blanket "you can send anything you want anywhere you want/you can send nothing to anywhere" switch, a finer-grained constrained set of permissions may be the way to go. Specifically:
And if an app provider doesn't like the light shone on their activities... that's a pretty good indicator right there.
The issue with this is that most people will either choose locations that are well-known landmarks, or which they are associated with. This vastly reduces the potential search space for a password based upon a physical location. But even if you choose a location at random... Let's pull a number out of the air: let's suppose there are 100 million buildings in the United States that represent potential candidate "geokeys". That's what, a 27-bit key? How long would it take to exhaustively brute-force a 27-bit keyspace?
The other issue is that you now have a dependency upon the map-display. If it ever changes (new satellite imagery, the Taco Bell you use as your key moves across the street to a new building), or the map-server is down, you can't get in without some sort of time-consuming (and itself potentially hackable) recovery method.
Nice idea on paper, and far better than choosing a random word that appears in /usr/share/dict/words (480 thousand entries on my installation) ... but still weak compared to even a 6-byte password composed entirely of ASCII 33-96 chosen at random (64 possible values per character, 64 = 2^6, 6*6 = 36, keyspace = 2^36 = 69 billion possibilities).