I agree with the sentiment regarding not having the stuff you bought "in the cloud". I wouldn't go as far as saying I want to buy physical media.. but I want an actual (DRM free) file. The netflix concept I don't mind.. because you pay a pretty reasonable monthly fee for access to their entire catalog.. rather than specifically buying movies. If I specifically pay for something though.. I want it in my control forever.
The problem with physical media is the speed at which you go from "hey, I'd like to see that" to actually watching it. I'm a very impulsive person, and I watch a lot of movies/tv shows/documentaries. Give me the ability to pay some money and be watching it within 5 minutes (streaming) or an hour.. and you'll make money. This to me is what the internet _should_ mean to entertainment. This is where they could be making money hand over fist if they'd just for once in the history of big media actually go with innovation rather than fighting it.
Kinda thought they've been doing that for a while.. seriously.. that's actually the image I get.. and I suspect it's not too far from the truth in a lot of cases.
Seriously.. think of something you want to watch.. plug it in to netflix canada search..
You might get lucky... but so far at _least_ 90% of the time I get "this title is not available, but here are 3 suggestions you've never heard of that we can provide you".
It even extends fo documentaries. Discovery had a nice series called "breaking vegas" (not the documentary on the MIT blackjack team.. but a series that kind of followed in the same light). It's there... but not available in Canada. That's the type of stuff I'd pay for on a whim. Something the other day made me remember that series.. and I thought "hey.. I wouldn't mind seeing that again..". Completely willing to pay for it. Money in my pocket (so to speak).. theirs for the taking. NOPE!!.. don't want it!!! But please stop downloading stuff cause it's costing us money!!!
I'm not too knowledgeable on the issue, but my thought would be that science and a general trend toward science is pulling more people away from religion.
Religion as a whole seems to combat science in one of two ways: a) evolve itself to incorporate science (science did it.. but god did science!).. which is probably getting harder and harder to do, and by talking about science you get people thinking about science... and then they question the whole thing. b) ignore science, and go more conservative/insane.. which is what we are seeing.
It really doesn't seem like they have future plans at all.
What they want is to keep people on physical media. Rather than innovate and give the people what they want... they call out the lawyers and lobbyists and try to sue people into submission.
Here in Canada, there really is no sane way to legally download. This is mostly the fault of the CRTC/CBC, but essentially if it's a show you've heard of, you probably won't find it available in Canada for legal download. You have people like me, who WANT TO BUY STUFF that we can EASILY GET FOR FREE... and we have no way to do it! The stupidity of this actually makes me angry.
In other news.. the gentleman wielding the running chainsaw could probably kick you really hard with those steel toe bootsand maybe even poke you in the eye!
I know RAID isn't _really_ a backup.. that's why I put backup in quotes;p
I do have backups of the ripped DVDs.. namely.. the original DVDs. I probably have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500. I’ve actually re-ripped my entire collection recently (to a higher quality format.. which I won’t name in an effort to avoid an unrelated flamewar). Done sporadically, it took about a month. Basically a powerful multi processor box with 6 DVD drives, and a frontend with nice queue support. I wouldn't really call this infeasible. Inconvenient, sure but not infeasible.
Ok.. so now time to put you on the spot. How the heck would _you_ backup 6TB (possibly 12TB or even more down the road). The _cheapest_ solution would seem to be a complete mirror of the system, which seems a little overkill to avoid a months work in the unlikely-ish event of a raid failure. Would take forever to remotely transfer somewhere over the internet, and keeping any kind of backup of thise size in sync would be way more inconvenient then re-ripping a bunch of DVDs.
Worth noting... been running raid systems for years (this is my third file sever, and have used raid on my desktops/other servers for quite some time), never had one fail. Yes I know it's possible (this is why I have local and offsite backups of the irreplaceable stuff), but the closest I've ever come is not being able to start up the array a few times due to hardware glitches knocking out the drives uncleanly. A little gentle massaging (and in one case superblock editing) and have always managed to get things going again with no signs of corruption. Maybe I'm just really lucky?
This is actually my third file server. And before that, I had a similar structure on whatever machine I called my desktop. It has kind of evolved.. as you said.. new system is a good time for cleaning up and moving stuff around... but in general this is just a more refined version of what I had in the 90s.
I don't have anything going back as far as you... oldest I have is some qbasic and turbo c projects in my code directory. I also have some old TV shows that they still haven't released on DVD. They were ripped from VHS recordings (back when that wasn't an easy thing to do!).
Making a phone call and sending an email are also logically equivalent.
Practically though, file names and tagging/metadata are very different. Information in file names is universally available to every program on the system. Tagging/metadata requires program specific support. The amount of information you can cram into a file name however is considerably limited when compared to tagging/metadata systems.
LIAN LI PC-P80 with 3x of those 5 drive in 3x 5.25" trayless hotswap backplane deals, and one individual tray hotswap bay (with two trays, one for each backup drive). I went with the PC-P80 because it's got fans on the door.. which means you don't lose cooling by filling all your 5.25" bays, and you get cooling on all of them.
Currently 8x 2TB drives (generic semi-cheap sata.. different brands bought at different times) in a raid6 config, giving me 12TB and setup so that 2 drives can fail. (This only fills two of the backplanes, however I figured it was best two buy the third one, as if I went to upgrade it might no longer be available).
Pretty generic motherboard/processor/ram and a couple cheap sata interface cards. Resource usage on the thing is very low, even with the whole thing encrypted.
Linux software raid, xfs file system (though I'm considering moving to something with checksums.. zfs if it didn't suck on Linux). Shared via NFS.
Usual pseudo-server stuff. I use nut to manage all the various UPSes in my network. I have things set up so that everything powers down before the file server (as even with the various allow fail settings, NFS suddenly dropping _still_ totally hangs up machines).
I run gentoo on the thing. Normally I'd never do this on a server.. but it's what I use on everything else, so it just makes things simpler.
I actually am very happy with my setup. This is my third file server, and I've kind of learned something from each one. This time around I actually developed _written procedures_ for all the various recovery and maintenance tasks.. and tested them before I put real data on the thing. This means when I want to add another drive, or a drive fails and I need to replace it, I have a step by step procedure I can follow (vice the usual frantic google searching and "oh man I hope this works").
That other "elsewhere" drive I store with the irreplaceable stuff.. is offsite. As for the DVDs and other replaceable stuff.. if my house burns down that would be pretty low on the list (and could be re-purchased or replaced.. kind of the definition of "replaceable").
That’s always been enough for me. Never got into all this tagging/meta data stuff. If there’s anything I’d ever want to search on... I put it in the file name. Indexed every night via slocate.
backup_links is part of my hacked together backup system.
The thing is raid6, setup so two drives can fail without loss of data. I see this as adequate “backup” for stuff that is replaceable (the large portion of my media is rips of DVDs I own... so although it would be a huge pain in the ass to re-rip them all... it’s not impossible). Stuff that is irreplaceable, I backup to separate hard drives (via hot swap trays).
I leave one backup drive plugged into the machine, and keep the other elsewhere. I periodically swap these drives. I have a script that just rsyncs the files and directories pointed to in backup_links (the irreplaceable ones) to the currently plugged in drive (and yes I verified that I’m not getting a backup of my links;p). This way I always have one drive that has a pretty recent backup (runs nightly), and one drive that has at most a month or so old backup if the plugged in one fails for some reason.
backups is backed up files from other machines.
Keeping everything in one place helps with the organization I think. Most of the other machines on this network are basically just OS installs. All the real files are on the file server. My desktop runs of a small SSD, which is not even half filled.
There is no middle ground (from my perspective). You either go “dumb phone” or all out.
I imagine there are a lot of people like myself, who have no desire to be connected every moment of the day. I have a computer at home, and a computer at work... no need for a computer between those points.
I’d love to be able to quickly look something up or use GPS/google maps on the odd occasion, but wouldn’t use it often enough to justify $70 a month, which here in Canada seems to generally be the minimum. That’s just too much money for something I might use once or twice a month.
As for the whole status symbol thing... good grief. Maybe in certain parts of the population or certain ages but even when I was in school I don’t remember any of this status symbol garbage. People got popular by other means (what music they listened to, doing and selling drugs, etc). And if your out of school.. get a life!
I guess, but having an overclocked i7 and 6GB of DDR3.. recompiling those 136 packages.. or the kernel because you need some obscure option.. is not the same big deal once was. I actually remember waiting for _DAYS_ to compile KDE libs. To be honest if that was still the case, I'd probably be using ubuntu at this point!
That said, performance was never my main motivator for using Gentoo. It was more the flexibility and general approach to things. Gentoo lets you just "do it" without trying to shovel high horse RMS mentality at you. I'm all for preference of open software to closed software, but let me make the decision. And sometimes you do need to use something that is closed because there is no reasonable open source equivilant. It's not as big a deal now with Debian (or so I hear) but back in "the day" you really had to fight your system to use Java. Then you really had to fight it to use sun's Java (it would seem to periodically try to install blackdown when doing an update). It was the same for a lot of "not free" software. And of course the whole firefox/iceweasel thing was rediculous.. and in general the Debian practice of mucking with packages well beyond what is reasonable (imo) kind of annoys me. I also prefer to start with a relatively empty system and add what I want.. rather than start with a loaded system and remove what I don't.
Ok.. that really wasn't supposed to be a troll/flamebait! Just kind of got on rant and kept going! Feel free to mod appropriately:)
I actually have a cron job that does a sync and an emerge _pretend_.. then emails the results to me. I've found this works as a great "better update soon.. list is getting longer" reminder.
It does seem un-necessary.. but I guess that is part of the trade off. Gentoo is very flexible but fragile.. Debian is solid as a rock but less flexible. And we've gradually seen Debian become more flexible and Gentoo become less fragile.. but I think deep down you are always going to have this, just as a result of the mindset and core design of both distros.
It seems to have gotten a lot more polished over the last few years. A lot less "surprise, broken system" and fewer, more generic/sane use flags (but not so generic as to defeat the purpose).
Personally I don't like Debian (gentoo user).. but I do admit it drives a lot of open source.
And it does strike me odd that ubuntu is pulling off the Debian repos, but seems to take all the credit (best Debian ever gets is "it's based off Debian"). This is probably not intentional, and it makes sense (re-inventing the wheel should be avoided if reasonable).. it just kind of "looks bad".
That tends to be my response to most conspiracy theories.
Yes, I think small highly placed groups can run a conspiracy.. but these big "everyones involved" deals can't work. Too many people who have to be kept happy.. too much potential for a leak.
It's the old "with physical access" argument.. except scaled up. Someone within an organization would I imagine have a pretty good chance of compromising the system. Not saying it's acceptable.. but I would guess a reality.
It's the trade off thing. You need to give people access to stuff so they can do their job. The more locked down you make things, the slower they work. Slower work is more expensive.. etc.
So it has to scale. Your new "everything is riding on this" designs... yeah.. spend a fortune protecting it. But can people afford to spend a fortune protecting everything (serious question).
There is also a problem solving component to it. Yes, being able to google that problem and find something that at least gets you started is an important skill, but there are occasionally original problems, and sometimes seeing what others have done can hinder creativity.
I always make a habit of working a problem initially with no reference material, to develop a kinda rough first impression solution. Then I'll go looking around at similar problems and how people have solved them. Existing collective experience is too great an asset to ignore, but at the same time if we just copy off one another, nothing moves forward.
I totally agree that making students memorize arbitrary facts is pointless. Memorizing and (more importantly) understanding core best practices is valuable, but having students write a test on "how to use random almost obsolete library X to do Y" is just silly.
What about cellphone detectors. I’m sure there is a technology that can detect and triangulate the radiation spewing from those things. And they are probably less illegal than jammers.
I suspect a lot of the stuff that gets smuggled into prisons comes from or is aided by underpaid prison staff (I really think it’s amazing how little they make considering the risk they take) either directly or indirectly. I don’t see how this kind of stuff could make it in, in the quantities that it does, without at least a little help. Even if you came up with a good technical way to stop the cellphone problem, all it takes is one guard to look the other way, and it’s defeated.
Then again I’ve never been to prison nor been a corrections officer... so I admit I have no clue how stuff actually works there.
Indeed.. I used "app" in conversation long before the whole app store thing. In fact I still use it for refering to traditional software.
I'll admit the line is blurry on what constitutes a web page and what constitutes a web application these days. Just about every web page has _some_ application like qualities. I would say google search and gmail are definitely applications, but what of sites like slashdot and youtube.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the sentiment regarding not having the stuff you bought "in the cloud". I wouldn't go as far as saying I want to buy physical media.. but I want an actual (DRM free) file. The netflix concept I don't mind.. because you pay a pretty reasonable monthly fee for access to their entire catalog.. rather than specifically buying movies. If I specifically pay for something though.. I want it in my control forever.
The problem with physical media is the speed at which you go from "hey, I'd like to see that" to actually watching it. I'm a very impulsive person, and I watch a lot of movies/tv shows/documentaries. Give me the ability to pay some money and be watching it within 5 minutes (streaming) or an hour .. and you'll make money. This to me is what the internet _should_ mean to entertainment. This is where they could be making money hand over fist if they'd just for once in the history of big media actually go with innovation rather than fighting it.
Kinda thought they've been doing that for a while .. seriously.. that's actually the image I get.. and I suspect it's not too far from the truth in a lot of cases.
Have you actually looked at their library?
Seriously.. think of something you want to watch.. plug it in to netflix canada search..
You might get lucky... but so far at _least_ 90% of the time I get "this title is not available, but here are 3 suggestions you've never heard of that we can provide you".
It even extends fo documentaries. Discovery had a nice series called "breaking vegas" (not the documentary on the MIT blackjack team.. but a series that kind of followed in the same light). It's there... but not available in Canada. That's the type of stuff I'd pay for on a whim. Something the other day made me remember that series.. and I thought "hey.. I wouldn't mind seeing that again..". Completely willing to pay for it. Money in my pocket (so to speak).. theirs for the taking. NOPE!!.. don't want it!!! But please stop downloading stuff cause it's costing us money!!!
I'm not too knowledgeable on the issue, but my thought would be that science and a general trend toward science is pulling more people away from religion.
Religion as a whole seems to combat science in one of two ways: .. which is probably getting harder and harder to do, and by talking about science you get people thinking about science... and then they question the whole thing. .. which is what we are seeing.
a) evolve itself to incorporate science (science did it.. but god did science!)
b) ignore science, and go more conservative/insane
It really doesn't seem like they have future plans at all.
What they want is to keep people on physical media. Rather than innovate and give the people what they want... they call out the lawyers and lobbyists and try to sue people into submission.
Here in Canada, there really is no sane way to legally download. This is mostly the fault of the CRTC/CBC, but essentially if it's a show you've heard of, you probably won't find it available in Canada for legal download. You have people like me, who WANT TO BUY STUFF that we can EASILY GET FOR FREE... and we have no way to do it! The stupidity of this actually makes me angry.
Couldn't they already do this with cookies?
In other news.. the gentleman wielding the running chainsaw could probably kick you really hard with those steel toe bootsand maybe even poke you in the eye!
I know RAID isn't _really_ a backup.. that's why I put backup in quotes ;p
I do have backups of the ripped DVDs.. namely.. the original DVDs. I probably have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500. I’ve actually re-ripped my entire collection recently (to a higher quality format.. which I won’t name in an effort to avoid an unrelated flamewar). Done sporadically, it took about a month. Basically a powerful multi processor box with 6 DVD drives, and a frontend with nice queue support. I wouldn't really call this infeasible. Inconvenient, sure but not infeasible.
Ok.. so now time to put you on the spot. How the heck would _you_ backup 6TB (possibly 12TB or even more down the road). The _cheapest_ solution would seem to be a complete mirror of the system, which seems a little overkill to avoid a months work in the unlikely-ish event of a raid failure. Would take forever to remotely transfer somewhere over the internet, and keeping any kind of backup of thise size in sync would be way more inconvenient then re-ripping a bunch of DVDs.
Worth noting... been running raid systems for years (this is my third file sever, and have used raid on my desktops/other servers for quite some time), never had one fail. Yes I know it's possible (this is why I have local and offsite backups of the irreplaceable stuff), but the closest I've ever come is not being able to start up the array a few times due to hardware glitches knocking out the drives uncleanly. A little gentle massaging (and in one case superblock editing) and have always managed to get things going again with no signs of corruption. Maybe I'm just really lucky?
I can relate to that.
This is actually my third file server. And before that, I had a similar structure on whatever machine I called my desktop. It has kind of evolved.. as you said.. new system is a good time for cleaning up and moving stuff around... but in general this is just a more refined version of what I had in the 90s.
I don't have anything going back as far as you... oldest I have is some qbasic and turbo c projects in my code directory. I also have some old TV shows that they still haven't released on DVD. They were ripped from VHS recordings (back when that wasn't an easy thing to do!).
In the most abstract sense.. sure.
Making a phone call and sending an email are also logically equivalent.
Practically though, file names and tagging/metadata are very different. Information in file names is universally available to every program on the system. Tagging/metadata requires program specific support. The amount of information you can cram into a file name however is considerably limited when compared to tagging/metadata systems.
LIAN LI PC-P80 with 3x of those 5 drive in 3x 5.25" trayless hotswap backplane deals, and one individual tray hotswap bay (with two trays, one for each backup drive). I went with the PC-P80 because it's got fans on the door.. which means you don't lose cooling by filling all your 5.25" bays, and you get cooling on all of them.
Currently 8x 2TB drives (generic semi-cheap sata.. different brands bought at different times) in a raid6 config, giving me 12TB and setup so that 2 drives can fail. (This only fills two of the backplanes, however I figured it was best two buy the third one, as if I went to upgrade it might no longer be available).
Pretty generic motherboard/processor/ram and a couple cheap sata interface cards. Resource usage on the thing is very low, even with the whole thing encrypted.
Linux software raid, xfs file system (though I'm considering moving to something with checksums.. zfs if it didn't suck on Linux). Shared via NFS.
Usual pseudo-server stuff. I use nut to manage all the various UPSes in my network. I have things set up so that everything powers down before the file server (as even with the various allow fail settings, NFS suddenly dropping _still_ totally hangs up machines).
I run gentoo on the thing. Normally I'd never do this on a server.. but it's what I use on everything else, so it just makes things simpler.
I actually am very happy with my setup. This is my third file server, and I've kind of learned something from each one. This time around I actually developed _written procedures_ for all the various recovery and maintenance tasks.. and tested them before I put real data on the thing. This means when I want to add another drive, or a drive fails and I need to replace it, I have a step by step procedure I can follow (vice the usual frantic google searching and "oh man I hope this works").
That other "elsewhere" drive I store with the irreplaceable stuff .. is offsite. As for the DVDs and other replaceable stuff.. if my house burns down that would be pretty low on the list (and could be re-purchased or replaced.. kind of the definition of "replaceable").
media/video/etc..
I figured it didn't even need to be said ;p
.. seriously.. they still work for me.
I’ve got a 12TB file server (~6TB filled). It’s arranged as follows:
documents/
incoming_downloads/ (before you ask.. yes.. _legit_ downloads)
media/
media/video/
media/video/movies/
media/video/tv_shows/
media/video/tv_shows/some_tv_show/
media/video/standup
media/video/etc..
media/music/
media/images/
media/images/various_subfolders/
code/
virtual_machines/
tmp/
backup_links/
backups/
That’s always been enough for me. Never got into all this tagging/meta data stuff. If there’s anything I’d ever want to search on... I put it in the file name. Indexed every night via slocate.
backup_links is part of my hacked together backup system.
The thing is raid6, setup so two drives can fail without loss of data. I see this as adequate “backup” for stuff that is replaceable (the large portion of my media is rips of DVDs I own... so although it would be a huge pain in the ass to re-rip them all... it’s not impossible). Stuff that is irreplaceable, I backup to separate hard drives (via hot swap trays).
I leave one backup drive plugged into the machine, and keep the other elsewhere. I periodically swap these drives. I have a script that just rsyncs the files and directories pointed to in backup_links (the irreplaceable ones) to the currently plugged in drive (and yes I verified that I’m not getting a backup of my links ;p). This way I always have one drive that has a pretty recent backup (runs nightly), and one drive that has at most a month or so old backup if the plugged in one fails for some reason.
backups is backed up files from other machines.
Keeping everything in one place helps with the organization I think. Most of the other machines on this network are basically just OS installs. All the real files are on the file server. My desktop runs of a small SSD, which is not even half filled.
Exactly.
There is no middle ground (from my perspective). You either go “dumb phone” or all out.
I imagine there are a lot of people like myself, who have no desire to be connected every moment of the day. I have a computer at home, and a computer at work... no need for a computer between those points.
I’d love to be able to quickly look something up or use GPS/google maps on the odd occasion, but wouldn’t use it often enough to justify $70 a month, which here in Canada seems to generally be the minimum. That’s just too much money for something I might use once or twice a month.
As for the whole status symbol thing... good grief. Maybe in certain parts of the population or certain ages but even when I was in school I don’t remember any of this status symbol garbage. People got popular by other means (what music they listened to, doing and selling drugs, etc). And if your out of school.. get a life!
I guess, but having an overclocked i7 and 6GB of DDR3 .. recompiling those 136 packages.. or the kernel because you need some obscure option.. is not the same big deal once was. I actually remember waiting for _DAYS_ to compile KDE libs. To be honest if that was still the case, I'd probably be using ubuntu at this point!
That said, performance was never my main motivator for using Gentoo. It was more the flexibility and general approach to things. Gentoo lets you just "do it" without trying to shovel high horse RMS mentality at you. I'm all for preference of open software to closed software, but let me make the decision. And sometimes you do need to use something that is closed because there is no reasonable open source equivilant. It's not as big a deal now with Debian (or so I hear) but back in "the day" you really had to fight your system to use Java. Then you really had to fight it to use sun's Java (it would seem to periodically try to install blackdown when doing an update). It was the same for a lot of "not free" software. And of course the whole firefox/iceweasel thing was rediculous .. and in general the Debian practice of mucking with packages well beyond what is reasonable (imo) kind of annoys me. I also prefer to start with a relatively empty system and add what I want.. rather than start with a loaded system and remove what I don't.
Ok.. that really wasn't supposed to be a troll/flamebait! Just kind of got on rant and kept going! Feel free to mod appropriately :)
Totally.
I actually have a cron job that does a sync and an emerge _pretend_ .. then emails the results to me. I've found this works as a great "better update soon.. list is getting longer" reminder.
It does seem un-necessary.. but I guess that is part of the trade off. Gentoo is very flexible but fragile.. Debian is solid as a rock but less flexible. And we've gradually seen Debian become more flexible and Gentoo become less fragile.. but I think deep down you are always going to have this, just as a result of the mindset and core design of both distros.
It seems to have gotten a lot more polished over the last few years. A lot less "surprise, broken system" and fewer, more generic/sane use flags (but not so generic as to defeat the purpose).
Personally I don't like Debian (gentoo user) .. but I do admit it drives a lot of open source.
And it does strike me odd that ubuntu is pulling off the Debian repos, but seems to take all the credit (best Debian ever gets is "it's based off Debian"). This is probably not intentional, and it makes sense (re-inventing the wheel should be avoided if reasonable) .. it just kind of "looks bad".
That tends to be my response to most conspiracy theories.
Yes, I think small highly placed groups can run a conspiracy.. but these big "everyones involved" deals can't work. Too many people who have to be kept happy.. too much potential for a leak.
They've been around for a while. They even did a whole "we're going down due to lack of donations" sort of thing.
The whole Mannings thing is what made wikileaks mainstream.
It's the old "with physical access" argument.. except scaled up. Someone within an organization would I imagine have a pretty good chance of compromising the system. Not saying it's acceptable.. but I would guess a reality.
It's the trade off thing. You need to give people access to stuff so they can do their job. The more locked down you make things, the slower they work. Slower work is more expensive.. etc.
So it has to scale. Your new "everything is riding on this" designs... yeah.. spend a fortune protecting it. But can people afford to spend a fortune protecting everything (serious question).
Agreed... sorta.
There is also a problem solving component to it. Yes, being able to google that problem and find something that at least gets you started is an important skill, but there are occasionally original problems, and sometimes seeing what others have done can hinder creativity.
I always make a habit of working a problem initially with no reference material, to develop a kinda rough first impression solution. Then I'll go looking around at similar problems and how people have solved them. Existing collective experience is too great an asset to ignore, but at the same time if we just copy off one another, nothing moves forward.
I totally agree that making students memorize arbitrary facts is pointless. Memorizing and (more importantly) understanding core best practices is valuable, but having students write a test on "how to use random almost obsolete library X to do Y" is just silly.
Too much could change between now and then (then probably being in about a decade or so).
I'm with OP, when my ISP gives me one.. i'll deal with it.
What about cellphone detectors. I’m sure there is a technology that can detect and triangulate the radiation spewing from those things. And they are probably less illegal than jammers.
I suspect a lot of the stuff that gets smuggled into prisons comes from or is aided by underpaid prison staff (I really think it’s amazing how little they make considering the risk they take) either directly or indirectly. I don’t see how this kind of stuff could make it in, in the quantities that it does, without at least a little help. Even if you came up with a good technical way to stop the cellphone problem, all it takes is one guard to look the other way, and it’s defeated.
Then again I’ve never been to prison nor been a corrections officer... so I admit I have no clue how stuff actually works there.
Indeed.. I used "app" in conversation long before the whole app store thing. In fact I still use it for refering to traditional software.
I'll admit the line is blurry on what constitutes a web page and what constitutes a web application these days. Just about every web page has _some_ application like qualities. I would say google search and gmail are definitely applications, but what of sites like slashdot and youtube.