ASDFnz writes "It has been just over two months since the bitcoin block chain was rocked by a near disastrous fork causing the bitcoin price to crash...."
Right. Near fucking disastrous. You can see the effect right here, after clicking the "DRAW" button. At least, if you look very hard, and squint just right, you might just be able to pick up the crash that happened 2 months ago.
Actually, I can't see a bloody thing. ASDFnz is a liar.
Must we really publish brain farts from a fanboi on slashdot's front page? This "news item" is completely substance free. No description of technology, no links, no science, no official announcement from someone you might believe. It uses terms that don't exist - there is no 5G - or at least the mob responsible for naming GSM, 3G, 4G, LTE, LTE Advanced doesn't have one yet. And there is nothing particularly special about 1Gbps download speed. LTE Advanced already does that if is has around 67MHz of bandwidth available, and you are the only one using the cell.
So let me see, what is there that could justify its position on the front page? Oh I see now - a baseless jibe at a Apple. That's OK then.
Hmmm. A genuine attempt at a helpful response form an AC. Thanks!
It's possible I guess, but unlikely. Firstly this is the first time I've heard malloc has become thread safe. I wrote most of the malloc's I used, and they were never thread safe. Secondly, in my desperation I went to a single lock that was only unlocked across blocking OS calls. It was over a decade ago, so it was still in the single CPU era. All I really wanted was co-routines - in other words separate stack to store some state on, so the one lock solution with only one thread every executing should have been fine. Except it wasn't.
I think that hits the nail on the head. A decade or so go I wrote a multi threaded C program. No big deal I thought - I've written my own OS's before after all.
I could not get it reliable. Despite my best efforts, it segfaulted, it looked like I had got the locking around some C linked lists wrong but I could not see how I had stuffed it up and the core dumps were so corrupted I never succeeded in tracing it back to a cause. In the end I gave up, and just wrapped the thing in a shell script that restarted it every time is stopped.
Many years passed, and as they passed an odd thing happened. The program crashed less and less, and today it is is rock solid - and all I have done is recompile the thing every so often. Not a line of code has been modified. With the benefit of hindsight it's all obvious of course - there weren't any problems in my code. The issue was the C libraries. Apparently the people who originally wrote pthread's didn't know how do to concurrent programming. The thought hadn't occurred to me back when I wrote the program, but after a decade of watching young turks cock it up the thought wasn't even surprising.
The reality is very few people do truly concurrent programming now. It wasn't always that way - many of us did embedded programming in a world full of interrupts. Just like a today's C programmers have either learnt how to survive in a world of manual memory management, undefined operations and aliasing or sink from trace, we also wrote every line while keeping a map of every line of interrupt code could be doing while it executed. The story is right in one way it's not that hard. After a couple of years of interrupts going up their own arse and you will have it down pat.
But who gets the chance to get that sort of experience nowadays? I recall reading the Java memory model and drooling - the young kids of today have it laid on for them. The implications of what the memory model means is explained in simple words, and semaphores, mutexes, synchronised blocks - they are all provided. We had read the CPU's data sheet and write those primitives ourselves.
Put bluntly I doubt the guy doing the complaining knows much about concurrent programming himself. Such people must exist of course as some youngsters must have come along to write the kernels, EFI, bluetooth headsets and all those embedded devices I use now. But if you aren't one of them - well you haven't been bitten often and hard enough to get the right mindset to do concurrent programming. Nonetheless if the young programmers I've met are any guide, you will be naive enough to think you can. Everybody I know who can do concurrent programming avoids threads like the plague. They would never tell off a newbie for not learning how to use them. Instead they would be explaining how to re-structure the problem to avoid them or if they can't be avoid how to keep their use to an absolute minimum so you expose yourself to as little indeterminacy as possible.
No, fiber is far more expensive if you do it proper.
Yeah. A person who spends his time running short runs of cable would think that - because he thinks only in terms of the cost of the cable. But when you are digging up streets the cost of running the cable completely dominates the cost of the physical medium, and because of that other attributes of fibre come into play.
Firstly, it can support longer runs - as in 20 km 5km. That means it can cover 16 times the area before it is necessary to put active electronics and air-conditioning in the street. Secondly, it lasts longer. No one really knows how long because it doesn't break, but manufacturers are currently offering 50 year guarantees. And it is water proof.
So, yes while fibre may be slightly more expensive to run - particularly for short runs, the longer term maintenance costs are far smaller. Quite apart from anything else, simply doubling the amount of time before you have to re-run the cable dwarfs any savings you might make medium.
So you are dead wrong. When running new cable for the last mile fibre is the cheaper option in the long term. No one in their right mind would run copper nowadays.
As a person who wears a bum bag (or fanny pack as they call it in the US) and a bluetooth headset, I hope are and will forever remain nerdy.
The worst thing that can happen to any useful piece of technology is that it becomes the opposite of nerdy - a fashion item. Suddenly looks become more important that functionality. And because there are so many more fashion tragic's than nerds, the capitalist economy responds by making things that are barely useful.
Take mobile phones. Yes, mobile phones were bricks, or candy bars, or whatever. But they lasted for a week or so on a single charge. Then they became a fashion item. Fashion means slim, apparently. Modern smart phones could easily last a day with heavy usage (the sort of use I put them to when I am in a foreign city using them for navigation, information and communication) - if they weren't so bloody slim. The battery contributes less than 25% of the device volume, so adding a mm or two and re-arranging everything to suit would would more than double battery life. This just translates into making them as thick as the old candy bar phones. Yes, you can get bigger batteries - but then it doesn't fit into all the accessories - like the car cradle. I've taken to carrying around a spare battery.
Having made them slim, they next went to wall to wall glass. And then the iPhone put glass on the rear. The older phones were so robust they have fallout out of my pocket while on my push bike at 30km/hr, skidded across the asphalt, hit the gutter and exploded into it's constituent bits (covers, battery,...). I picked it up, put it back together again and was fine. A modern smartphone on the other hand has been made so delicate, everybody puts it in a rubber case - hiding the very thing that is supposed to be making the fashion statement. And that makes sense how?
Next some of them have gone to non-removeable batteries, thus killing the "take a spare battery" backup plan. It also means if it doesn't get broken or otherwise get its delicate little brain smashed, the component rated to last the shortest amount of time can't be replaced.
Now laptops are going down the same route. By laptop, I don't mean netbooks - I mean the machines we buy now instead of desktops. The machines we plug several monitors into and a wired network. Oh wait - apparently they are supposed to make a fashion statement too, so now an RJ45 socket is too big. Seriously? On a device with a 17" display so large it is going to spend it's entire life on a desk, we have to remove the RJ45 socket because looking good is more important than having a reliable 1Gb/s network connection?
To be fair, it didn't start with Apple. I recall the first time somebody proudly showed me their new desktop box - and it glowed. Apparently LED's on bezel and inside the power supply were all the rage. WTF? A desktop box is supposed to be a powerhouse sitting quietly under the desk doing it's job for years without complaint, and without chewing too much power. It's major design constraints are form factor, air flow, and accessibility to the internal components so you could replace / upgrade them. LED's don't help any of them, and hinder a few. I guess that prepared me for laptop's going down the same path - wasting their precious battery power on looking like a glow in the dark alien monster.
I could go on - but suffices that I very much hope the article is right, and HUD devices remain too nerdy for the fashionistas. The day form starts dominating function is the day I'll start cursing them and their designers.
You make use of Android's "multiuser" feature. Work is one user, your personal life is the other. Android guarantees there is a 100% opaque firewall between the two users, so if work sends an "erase phone" command it erases their user, not the phone.
This pretty much solves the privacy and control aspects. The remaining downside is work still expects you to pay for tools to do the job they ask of you. But hey, at least you only have to carry one device.
If Google glass were to become popular, it would combine four elements: pervasiveness, non knowing when you are being recorded, the appearance of a legitimate motive for recording people, and connectivity.
The Luddites are out in force today. Try putting a little thought into it instead of letting your imagination run riot with doomsday scenarios.
First of all Google glass does have a recording light. Secondly, Google Glass stands out like dogs balls making it a very poor choice for surreptitious recording. A smart phone in a shirt pocket with it's camera peeking out over the top makes a much better choice. It doesn't have a recording light, it doesn't look out of place, and its larger storage capacity battery means it might last a useful amount of time.
The idea of an always on HUD has been an exciting prospect for years. Google is trying to make it a reality. In theory it could mean never having to take your phone out of your pocket to access information - it would be right there, in front of you, when you need it. In practice this iteration isn't likely to make the promise a reality. It is to constrained by battery power, CPU power, storage capacity and weight, so much so that they haven't put a 3G radio in it. It is unlikely it will have enough battery to survive a short evening outing. My guess is people in Google are scratching their heads, wondering how they are going to dampen the hype that has built up around glass down, as there is no way this first attempt can live up to it.
The process of refining bauxite to get aluminum is extremely energy intensive.
Yes, but so is driving a car. The real measure of this is the round trip losses. In this case they say their battery has a energy density of 8kWh per kilogram. They don't say what proportion of that 1 kg is consumed aluminium, so lets assume it all it is consumed. It takes 14 kWh to refine bauxite into aluminium. So you get 57% of the energy you put in.
It will be better than that. Unlike bauxite the used battery won't have mud or other impurities in it, making it cheaper to handle. And of that 1kg, I would of thought that at least 25% will be electrolyte and casing given you have to replace the electrolyte every 200 km. That would put the round trip efficiency in the 70%.. 80% range. That's pretty good - up there with pumped storage which everyone uses to smooth out energy supply if they have it available.
Aluminium processing plants are generally paired with power stations. The reason is a coal and nuclear power stations can't respond to load changes quickly, so they need to produce more than required and have a place to dump the rest. An aluminium refining plant can take all they can dump, and because what they are taking is variable they get it at a cheap price. The implication of that is aluminium refining plants are very good at smoothing out varying loads (although they can never go to 0). That makes they are reasonably well suited to renewable energy sources.
Err, last time I checked most spam's were trying to see me sell me something physical. And internet gambling doesn't. The odds if the person does successfully steal something off me via phishing, I or my bank is going to report it. The odd's of me reporting a successful Bitcoin transaction seems slim, since I am breaking the law. All that aside, if I purchase a perfectly legal object with Bitcoin, how on earth does the fact that I have received it alert the authorities that I have used Bitcoin to pay for it?
The exact purpose of those is to get a bunch of mules to deposit money from defrauded credit cards into overseas bank accounts.
If you say so. But what does that have to do with Bitcoin? If you understand what is going on with the mule's, you also understand the reason they are required is that bank notes (or indeed any bearer bond) is effectively untraceable and irreversible. Just like the exchange made with newly generated random keys used when transferring the bitcoins is untraceable and irreversible. If is isn't clear yet, the reason the mules are used is because they are where the power of law enforcement and regulation end. The reason Bitcoin is currently used for the black market is... the same.
Can anyone seriously make the argument that it won't be regulated?
Look, I don't know whether you noticed, but the things you quote: Silk Road, tax evasion, money laundering, and add to that Internet Gambling are already heavily regulated. In fact they are flat out illegal, with the threat of heavy penalties up to an including death to back up it. It is in that very heavily regulated environment that Bitcoin thrives. I know politicians do stump speeches about how they are going to bring this thing under control, but they they also do stump speeches are bringing world peace and how they will wage war on the axis of evil. Bonus for claiming they will do both in the same speech.
Think about it for just a second. How well do they manage to regulate SPAM, or phishing, and even DDOS attacks? They should give you an idea about how hard it is to regulate people exchanging bags of bits. It is just about impossible and that is when one end of the transaction didn't want it to happen willing report infractions. With Bitcoin both ends of the transaction are willing participants - you know, just like alcohol, which they tried to ban during the prohibition.
What they may succeed in doing is stopping Bitcoin growing out of its current role a currency for the black market, into a currency used for legitimate transactions. But in the long term even that may be doomed. The banking system is currently an unwanted parasite in just about every internet transaction, a parasite that usually steals 1% or so of the transaction value. You don't need a bank, or Vista to facilitate a bitcoin exchange. Currently US internet sales sit at around $250 Billion, and growing rapidly. $2..$3 Billion is a pretty hefty incentive to give the parasite the flick.
Right. The music industry is fixated on the Internet too, as is newspaper, magazine and book publishing businesses. They are, or at least were the ones with the money, so by your argument they should be leading the charge away shifting information using dead trees and plastic disc's to using bits and bytes instead.
Except, that isn't how it worked out, is it? Just like Microsoft should be leading the charge to in bring a solid working browser to the masses, it isn't going t happen.
I would have thought the reason it doesn't happen is pretty obvious. Most of these companies are trying new untested directions, and in 10 years time most of them are going to be failures. That is why the DOE program makes sense. Very few are willing to put money into ventures like this, but nonetheless we need lots of the high risk ventures to find out what works. But high risk isn't compatible with someone who already has billions in his back pocket is has to make quarterly reports on how he is doing at making it grow. The individuals who come up with the pie in the sky ideas that don't work now, but are nonetheless willing to bet their house and pension on making it work aren't the same 20 year career plan individuals who have patiently worked their way up the corporate ladder to run a multi billion dollar company.
Sheesh, next you will be suggesting NASA should be put in charge of SpaceX.
It's sad, but my retired Symbian E70 remains to this day a better phone than any modern smart phone. It is smaller, faster to make a phone call, the battery lasted a week, the loud speaker was louder, the microphone is it was so good we ended using in preference to dedicated devices for recording messages, the native SIP stack in it (and we are talking 5 years go now) was better and more reliable than in Android 4.2.1 today, it could be doing several things and still play music and podcasts without a single glitch, and it was dropped numerous times without a case and still works to this day. Some of those things, like the battery life and real time performance (eg the SIP stack) were due to Symbian. That it was a absolute bitch to program on is also due to Symbian.
I retired the E70 when I could no longer buy batteries for it. I didn't like the smartphone that replaced it at first because it sucks at every thing the E70 was good at, but gradually I discovered the function I used least in the smartphone was the phone. Much as I liked it, it is Symbian's time to go. It belongs to a bygone era when RAM was expensive, CPU's were gutless and and mobile phones were used primarily as phones.
You know that top level certs - those at the top of the hierarchy, are self signed, right? Gawd help us all, because if you are correct that means the entire X509 trust system is broken.
Actually, I say that's 1/2 right. Any system that forces you to go through an intermediate "trusted" third party you don't know from from a bar of soap is broken. You are far better off sending a self-signed cert via a side channel and not relying on a CA that may be compromised. GMail could offer you that option by allowed you to upload your cert, like just about every other POP/IMAP client on the planet does. But no, instead they insist on you using a system that that has already broken by countries like Iran to access GMail's users mailboxes, and almost certainly people have died as a result.
Ok, so they changed Gnome, learn to like the new UI or fork the old one, it's not the end of the world.
Of course it isn't the end of the world. Linux has many Window managers, so you just choose another one. On the other hand if could be the end of Gnome, as Gnome 2 was the default desktop on most distributions but almost to the man they have dropped Gnome 3 in favour of something else.
With Microsoft and Windows 8 the situation is a little different. There are no choices, nowhere for users to run to. I don't know how bad Windows 8 is because I've never used it, but if they have truly fucked it up it could be the end of the world for Microsoft.
I'll me too this. I have a Galaxy Nexus, and when I got it I also had micro SDCard slot anxiety. It arose partially because I had no way to transfer stuff to and from the device as I use Linux and its MTP was less that stellar (before I could just mount the SDCard as a USB drive), and partially because I wondered if 16Gb was enough.
Turned out the transfer problem was a complete non-issue. There are apps that turn it into a Web Server, an FTP server, a RSYNC server, a CIFS (ie Samba, Windows Share) server, and clients for Drop Box and every other internet storage system known to man. All of these options are faster, more portable, more robust, run over more transports (cable, WiFi, bluetooth, NFC) and are less risky than mounting an SDCard. It's now a case of having to put up with an inferior alternative - its more of a case of hoping I will never have to mount a USB FAT file system again.
As for the storage issue, that is turned out to be slightly more of a concern. I have a whole pile of pod casts I automatically download, an ebook library of 100's of books, 10 or so movies, a couple of complete seasons of TV shows, and a reader application that downs a number of sites for off-line reading. Admittedly the movies and TV shows are transcoded so the play natively, which makes them smaller. (Turns out watching a movie using Android's native player draws less watts than reading an ebook - go figure.) This is enough to keep me occupied for a 24 hour international plane fight. As I said it is a mild concern tight, as I only have a Gig or so spare. But it is difficult to imagine what else I could possibly put on there that is useful on the phone.
Turned out not having an SDCard comes with one huge plus. It makes the whole thing run faster. Even if you aren't using the SDCard, Android has to check it every time a file is opened in case it might be on there, and this ends up making a noticable speed difference. So much so that now I remove the SDCard from any device I own.
So I've gone from having SDCard anxiety, to ripping the bloody thing out in every device I own. Good riddance I say.
They may get what they wish for as it's happening already, but when it arrives it they will come to realise it wasn't what they wanted.
There are already companies that allow you to re-sell your access point bandwidth. It's not rocket science. They just provide you with a router than is also a captive portal. You get to use it for free of course, but if foreigner logs into it they charge them for the bandwidth and split the fee with you. In fact most paid for captive portals operate on this basis already.
In theory this should be a win-win for everybody. It sending a byte over a land line generally costs between 1/10 and 1/100 of sending the same byte over a commercial 3G/4G network. So the mobile user gets cheap ubiquitous data and the land line owner gets to make a little money on the side.
In practice, right now, that isn't how it's working out. Somehow these captive portal operators manage to make data on these networks more expensive than the commercial 3G/4G networks. But one day someone will figure out how to make it work, and on that day a new competitor the current 3G/4G networks will arise, and it will be in the form of millions of 802.11 microcells dotted around the country. I bet they know it's coming, but don't have a clue what to do about it. They will find themselves in the same position as music publishers, newspapers, TV - except in this case it will be a case of the internet eating its own.
As I said, even though I consider this almost a long term certainty and it is what the EFF is asking for now, it isn't what the EFF actually wants. The EFF wants open access points so people can send and receive information anonymously. In this new world order every access point will be open, but every byte will be paid for, and thus tied to a credit card.
All these web sites are owned by the same people. Are the EU saying a company can't mine the data the EU says it is allowed to collect? How on earth do you even police that?
Besides, it's a non-issue, as it is under the users control anyway. If you don't want Google tying the data together use different use names on each site. It is not like it is rocket science.
When I started with Unix too long ago, the philosophy was to develop a tool box that let people customise the box to their liking. FVWM was like that. It was flexible enough to turn something that looked like Windows 95 and OSX, but configuration was not for the feint of heart.
What I expected to follow FVWM was something even more flexible, that solved the configuration file from hell problem. Something so flexible that you could have emulated the current Android, Windows 8, and OSX interfaces. So, for example, you could decide whether you wanted the applications menu bar to be per part of each window like Win 95, or have a single global one like OSX, or not display it until a button press like Android. Where you could decide whether you wanted to run every application full screen, or in its own window, or something in between split over multiple virtual desktops. FVWM already came with a collection of menu, dialogue, and panel and task manager widgets - I expected this to be expanded in the usual open source way so there were 1000's of them, most of them useless, but spurred on by the toolbox mentality that made experimentation with news ideas was easy. I expected to a fight between API's that allowed you to play with touch and multi-touch, so that someone could in principle make an upward five fingered swipe with pike launch vim, or a three fingered back swipe would invoke the browsers back function, or a two fingered circle would do an Alt-Tab, the direction depending on the direction of the circle.
But that is not what we got. In fact, the reverse happened. As others have pointed out, instead of making Gnome 1.0 more flexible, the Gnome developers decided to solve Gnome's configuration problems by removing most of the configuration. In Gnome 3 it got to the point that when I decided the fonts Gnome were using were too big even the ability to edit that was taken away. (You have to install some tweak program.) Worse than that, not only can you not configure the layout and behaviour of Gnome 3 for the platform you are working on, it seems to be optimised for a platform no one uses it on - a small screen with a keyboard ?!?!
Look boys, I'll spell it out for you - the world is NOT converging to one platform everyone uses. The reverse is happening - it is splintering. Whereas a few years ago you could safely assume all your users has a large screen, mouse and keyboard, that assumption makes no sense today. At one end people have 3 x 27" 2880x1440 screen hooked to a single computer with a mouse, keyboard and stylus input device. And then we smoothly move through a number of form factors end up at some 3" screen has a touch screen without a keyboard. In this world you can not dream up the one true interface and expect everybody to be happy with it. The very idea is insane.
In the world we have today, the Unix way of providing toolbox people can use to customise to their environment should be having it its time in the sun. Sure it's more complex than iOS, but unlike iOS it could be made to work on everything, and unlike iOS we don't have to cater to unsophisticated users. Instead we it seems we have lost the original Unix philosophy we started with, and the result is rejection by the only people who used Linux on the desktop - the people who were attracted by that philosophy.
I see most people here are recommending VNC. VNC and its brethren work, but can be very slow. A propriety alternative is Team Viewer. It is free as in beer and like VNC runs on all platforms under the sun (including Android and iOS). It is unlike VNC in that it is rock solid (I've never seen it hang), always quick enough to useable and requires no special setup to pierce NAT and firewalls.
I hope that one day open source figures our what the magic sauce is in Team View is and replicates it in VNC. Until that day arrives when I need to get shit down, I just use TeamView.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. Near fucking disastrous. You can see the effect right here, after clicking the "DRAW" button. At least, if you look very hard, and squint just right, you might just be able to pick up the crash that happened 2 months ago.
Actually, I can't see a bloody thing. ASDFnz is a liar.
Must we really publish brain farts from a fanboi on slashdot's front page? This "news item" is completely substance free. No description of technology, no links, no science, no official announcement from someone you might believe. It uses terms that don't exist - there is no 5G - or at least the mob responsible for naming GSM, 3G, 4G, LTE, LTE Advanced doesn't have one yet. And there is nothing particularly special about 1Gbps download speed. LTE Advanced already does that if is has around 67MHz of bandwidth available, and you are the only one using the cell.
So let me see, what is there that could justify its position on the front page? Oh I see now - a baseless jibe at a Apple. That's OK then.
Hmmm. A genuine attempt at a helpful response form an AC. Thanks!
It's possible I guess, but unlikely. Firstly this is the first time I've heard malloc has become thread safe. I wrote most of the malloc's I used, and they were never thread safe. Secondly, in my desperation I went to a single lock that was only unlocked across blocking OS calls. It was over a decade ago, so it was still in the single CPU era. All I really wanted was co-routines - in other words separate stack to store some state on, so the one lock solution with only one thread every executing should have been fine. Except it wasn't.
I think that hits the nail on the head. A decade or so go I wrote a multi threaded C program. No big deal I thought - I've written my own OS's before after all.
I could not get it reliable. Despite my best efforts, it segfaulted, it looked like I had got the locking around some C linked lists wrong but I could not see how I had stuffed it up and the core dumps were so corrupted I never succeeded in tracing it back to a cause. In the end I gave up, and just wrapped the thing in a shell script that restarted it every time is stopped.
Many years passed, and as they passed an odd thing happened. The program crashed less and less, and today it is is rock solid - and all I have done is recompile the thing every so often. Not a line of code has been modified. With the benefit of hindsight it's all obvious of course - there weren't any problems in my code. The issue was the C libraries. Apparently the people who originally wrote pthread's didn't know how do to concurrent programming. The thought hadn't occurred to me back when I wrote the program, but after a decade of watching young turks cock it up the thought wasn't even surprising.
The reality is very few people do truly concurrent programming now. It wasn't always that way - many of us did embedded programming in a world full of interrupts. Just like a today's C programmers have either learnt how to survive in a world of manual memory management, undefined operations and aliasing or sink from trace, we also wrote every line while keeping a map of every line of interrupt code could be doing while it executed. The story is right in one way it's not that hard. After a couple of years of interrupts going up their own arse and you will have it down pat.
But who gets the chance to get that sort of experience nowadays? I recall reading the Java memory model and drooling - the young kids of today have it laid on for them. The implications of what the memory model means is explained in simple words, and semaphores, mutexes, synchronised blocks - they are all provided. We had read the CPU's data sheet and write those primitives ourselves.
Put bluntly I doubt the guy doing the complaining knows much about concurrent programming himself. Such people must exist of course as some youngsters must have come along to write the kernels, EFI, bluetooth headsets and all those embedded devices I use now. But if you aren't one of them - well you haven't been bitten often and hard enough to get the right mindset to do concurrent programming. Nonetheless if the young programmers I've met are any guide, you will be naive enough to think you can. Everybody I know who can do concurrent programming avoids threads like the plague. They would never tell off a newbie for not learning how to use them. Instead they would be explaining how to re-structure the problem to avoid them or if they can't be avoid how to keep their use to an absolute minimum so you expose yourself to as little indeterminacy as possible.
Yeah. A person who spends his time running short runs of cable would think that - because he thinks only in terms of the cost of the cable. But when you are digging up streets the cost of running the cable completely dominates the cost of the physical medium, and because of that other attributes of fibre come into play.
Firstly, it can support longer runs - as in 20 km 5km. That means it can cover 16 times the area before it is necessary to put active electronics and air-conditioning in the street. Secondly, it lasts longer. No one really knows how long because it doesn't break, but manufacturers are currently offering 50 year guarantees. And it is water proof.
So, yes while fibre may be slightly more expensive to run - particularly for short runs, the longer term maintenance costs are far smaller. Quite apart from anything else, simply doubling the amount of time before you have to re-run the cable dwarfs any savings you might make medium.
So you are dead wrong. When running new cable for the last mile fibre is the cheaper option in the long term. No one in their right mind would run copper nowadays.
As a person who wears a bum bag (or fanny pack as they call it in the US) and a bluetooth headset, I hope are and will forever remain nerdy.
The worst thing that can happen to any useful piece of technology is that it becomes the opposite of nerdy - a fashion item. Suddenly looks become more important that functionality. And because there are so many more fashion tragic's than nerds, the capitalist economy responds by making things that are barely useful.
Take mobile phones. Yes, mobile phones were bricks, or candy bars, or whatever. But they lasted for a week or so on a single charge. Then they became a fashion item. Fashion means slim, apparently. Modern smart phones could easily last a day with heavy usage (the sort of use I put them to when I am in a foreign city using them for navigation, information and communication) - if they weren't so bloody slim. The battery contributes less than 25% of the device volume, so adding a mm or two and re-arranging everything to suit would would more than double battery life. This just translates into making them as thick as the old candy bar phones. Yes, you can get bigger batteries - but then it doesn't fit into all the accessories - like the car cradle. I've taken to carrying around a spare battery.
Having made them slim, they next went to wall to wall glass. And then the iPhone put glass on the rear. The older phones were so robust they have fallout out of my pocket while on my push bike at 30km/hr, skidded across the asphalt, hit the gutter and exploded into it's constituent bits (covers, battery, ...). I picked it up, put it back together again and was fine. A modern smartphone on the other hand has been made so delicate, everybody puts it in a rubber case - hiding the very thing that is supposed to be making the fashion statement. And that makes sense how?
Next some of them have gone to non-removeable batteries, thus killing the "take a spare battery" backup plan. It also means if it doesn't get broken or otherwise get its delicate little brain smashed, the component rated to last the shortest amount of time can't be replaced.
Now laptops are going down the same route. By laptop, I don't mean netbooks - I mean the machines we buy now instead of desktops. The machines we plug several monitors into and a wired network. Oh wait - apparently they are supposed to make a fashion statement too, so now an RJ45 socket is too big. Seriously? On a device with a 17" display so large it is going to spend it's entire life on a desk, we have to remove the RJ45 socket because looking good is more important than having a reliable 1Gb/s network connection?
To be fair, it didn't start with Apple. I recall the first time somebody proudly showed me their new desktop box - and it glowed. Apparently LED's on bezel and inside the power supply were all the rage. WTF? A desktop box is supposed to be a powerhouse sitting quietly under the desk doing it's job for years without complaint, and without chewing too much power. It's major design constraints are form factor, air flow, and accessibility to the internal components so you could replace / upgrade them. LED's don't help any of them, and hinder a few. I guess that prepared me for laptop's going down the same path - wasting their precious battery power on looking like a glow in the dark alien monster.
I could go on - but suffices that I very much hope the article is right, and HUD devices remain too nerdy for the fashionistas. The day form starts dominating function is the day I'll start cursing them and their designers.
How about this for an option b:
You make use of Android's "multiuser" feature. Work is one user, your personal life is the other. Android guarantees there is a 100% opaque firewall between the two users, so if work sends an "erase phone" command it erases their user, not the phone.
This pretty much solves the privacy and control aspects. The remaining downside is work still expects you to pay for tools to do the job they ask of you. But hey, at least you only have to carry one device.
The Luddites are out in force today. Try putting a little thought into it instead of letting your imagination run riot with doomsday scenarios.
First of all Google glass does have a recording light. Secondly, Google Glass stands out like dogs balls making it a very poor choice for surreptitious recording. A smart phone in a shirt pocket with it's camera peeking out over the top makes a much better choice. It doesn't have a recording light, it doesn't look out of place, and its larger storage capacity battery means it might last a useful amount of time.
The idea of an always on HUD has been an exciting prospect for years. Google is trying to make it a reality. In theory it could mean never having to take your phone out of your pocket to access information - it would be right there, in front of you, when you need it. In practice this iteration isn't likely to make the promise a reality. It is to constrained by battery power, CPU power, storage capacity and weight, so much so that they haven't put a 3G radio in it. It is unlikely it will have enough battery to survive a short evening outing. My guess is people in Google are scratching their heads, wondering how they are going to dampen the hype that has built up around glass down, as there is no way this first attempt can live up to it.
It was news last week. How old does that make it in internet time?
Yes, but so is driving a car. The real measure of this is the round trip losses. In this case they say their battery has a energy density of 8kWh per kilogram. They don't say what proportion of that 1 kg is consumed aluminium, so lets assume it all it is consumed. It takes 14 kWh to refine bauxite into aluminium. So you get 57% of the energy you put in.
It will be better than that. Unlike bauxite the used battery won't have mud or other impurities in it, making it cheaper to handle. And of that 1kg, I would of thought that at least 25% will be electrolyte and casing given you have to replace the electrolyte every 200 km. That would put the round trip efficiency in the 70% .. 80% range. That's pretty good - up there with pumped storage which everyone uses to smooth out energy supply if they have it available.
Aluminium processing plants are generally paired with power stations. The reason is a coal and nuclear power stations can't respond to load changes quickly, so they need to produce more than required and have a place to dump the rest. An aluminium refining plant can take all they can dump, and because what they are taking is variable they get it at a cheap price. The implication of that is aluminium refining plants are very good at smoothing out varying loads (although they can never go to 0). That makes they are reasonably well suited to renewable energy sources.
Err, last time I checked most spam's were trying to see me sell me something physical. And internet gambling doesn't. The odds if the person does successfully steal something off me via phishing, I or my bank is going to report it. The odd's of me reporting a successful Bitcoin transaction seems slim, since I am breaking the law. All that aside, if I purchase a perfectly legal object with Bitcoin, how on earth does the fact that I have received it alert the authorities that I have used Bitcoin to pay for it?
If you say so. But what does that have to do with Bitcoin? If you understand what is going on with the mule's, you also understand the reason they are required is that bank notes (or indeed any bearer bond) is effectively untraceable and irreversible. Just like the exchange made with newly generated random keys used when transferring the bitcoins is untraceable and irreversible. If is isn't clear yet, the reason the mules are used is because they are where the power of law enforcement and regulation end. The reason Bitcoin is currently used for the black market is ... the same.
Look, I don't know whether you noticed, but the things you quote: Silk Road, tax evasion, money laundering, and add to that Internet Gambling are already heavily regulated. In fact they are flat out illegal, with the threat of heavy penalties up to an including death to back up it. It is in that very heavily regulated environment that Bitcoin thrives. I know politicians do stump speeches about how they are going to bring this thing under control, but they they also do stump speeches are bringing world peace and how they will wage war on the axis of evil. Bonus for claiming they will do both in the same speech.
Think about it for just a second. How well do they manage to regulate SPAM, or phishing, and even DDOS attacks? They should give you an idea about how hard it is to regulate people exchanging bags of bits. It is just about impossible and that is when one end of the transaction didn't want it to happen willing report infractions. With Bitcoin both ends of the transaction are willing participants - you know, just like alcohol, which they tried to ban during the prohibition.
What they may succeed in doing is stopping Bitcoin growing out of its current role a currency for the black market, into a currency used for legitimate transactions. But in the long term even that may be doomed. The banking system is currently an unwanted parasite in just about every internet transaction, a parasite that usually steals 1% or so of the transaction value. You don't need a bank, or Vista to facilitate a bitcoin exchange. Currently US internet sales sit at around $250 Billion, and growing rapidly. $2..$3 Billion is a pretty hefty incentive to give the parasite the flick.
Right. The music industry is fixated on the Internet too, as is newspaper, magazine and book publishing businesses. They are, or at least were the ones with the money, so by your argument they should be leading the charge away shifting information using dead trees and plastic disc's to using bits and bytes instead.
Except, that isn't how it worked out, is it? Just like Microsoft should be leading the charge to in bring a solid working browser to the masses, it isn't going t happen.
I would have thought the reason it doesn't happen is pretty obvious. Most of these companies are trying new untested directions, and in 10 years time most of them are going to be failures. That is why the DOE program makes sense. Very few are willing to put money into ventures like this, but nonetheless we need lots of the high risk ventures to find out what works. But high risk isn't compatible with someone who already has billions in his back pocket is has to make quarterly reports on how he is doing at making it grow. The individuals who come up with the pie in the sky ideas that don't work now, but are nonetheless willing to bet their house and pension on making it work aren't the same 20 year career plan individuals who have patiently worked their way up the corporate ladder to run a multi billion dollar company.
Sheesh, next you will be suggesting NASA should be put in charge of SpaceX.
It's sad, but my retired Symbian E70 remains to this day a better phone than any modern smart phone. It is smaller, faster to make a phone call, the battery lasted a week, the loud speaker was louder, the microphone is it was so good we ended using in preference to dedicated devices for recording messages, the native SIP stack in it (and we are talking 5 years go now) was better and more reliable than in Android 4.2.1 today, it could be doing several things and still play music and podcasts without a single glitch, and it was dropped numerous times without a case and still works to this day. Some of those things, like the battery life and real time performance (eg the SIP stack) were due to Symbian. That it was a absolute bitch to program on is also due to Symbian.
I retired the E70 when I could no longer buy batteries for it. I didn't like the smartphone that replaced it at first because it sucks at every thing the E70 was good at, but gradually I discovered the function I used least in the smartphone was the phone. Much as I liked it, it is Symbian's time to go. It belongs to a bygone era when RAM was expensive, CPU's were gutless and and mobile phones were used primarily as phones.
You know that top level certs - those at the top of the hierarchy, are self signed, right? Gawd help us all, because if you are correct that means the entire X509 trust system is broken.
Actually, I say that's 1/2 right. Any system that forces you to go through an intermediate "trusted" third party you don't know from from a bar of soap is broken. You are far better off sending a self-signed cert via a side channel and not relying on a CA that may be compromised. GMail could offer you that option by allowed you to upload your cert, like just about every other POP/IMAP client on the planet does. But no, instead they insist on you using a system that that has already broken by countries like Iran to access GMail's users mailboxes, and almost certainly people have died as a result.
This sucks, Google.
Of course it isn't the end of the world. Linux has many Window managers, so you just choose another one. On the other hand if could be the end of Gnome, as Gnome 2 was the default desktop on most distributions but almost to the man they have dropped Gnome 3 in favour of something else.
With Microsoft and Windows 8 the situation is a little different. There are no choices, nowhere for users to run to. I don't know how bad Windows 8 is because I've never used it, but if they have truly fucked it up it could be the end of the world for Microsoft.
No, it's not. It's moving to XFCE for Wheezy.
I'll me too this. I have a Galaxy Nexus, and when I got it I also had micro SDCard slot anxiety. It arose partially because I had no way to transfer stuff to and from the device as I use Linux and its MTP was less that stellar (before I could just mount the SDCard as a USB drive), and partially because I wondered if 16Gb was enough.
Turned out the transfer problem was a complete non-issue. There are apps that turn it into a Web Server, an FTP server, a RSYNC server, a CIFS (ie Samba, Windows Share) server, and clients for Drop Box and every other internet storage system known to man. All of these options are faster, more portable, more robust, run over more transports (cable, WiFi, bluetooth, NFC) and are less risky than mounting an SDCard. It's now a case of having to put up with an inferior alternative - its more of a case of hoping I will never have to mount a USB FAT file system again.
As for the storage issue, that is turned out to be slightly more of a concern. I have a whole pile of pod casts I automatically download, an ebook library of 100's of books, 10 or so movies, a couple of complete seasons of TV shows, and a reader application that downs a number of sites for off-line reading. Admittedly the movies and TV shows are transcoded so the play natively, which makes them smaller. (Turns out watching a movie using Android's native player draws less watts than reading an ebook - go figure.) This is enough to keep me occupied for a 24 hour international plane fight. As I said it is a mild concern tight, as I only have a Gig or so spare. But it is difficult to imagine what else I could possibly put on there that is useful on the phone.
Turned out not having an SDCard comes with one huge plus. It makes the whole thing run faster. Even if you aren't using the SDCard, Android has to check it every time a file is opened in case it might be on there, and this ends up making a noticable speed difference. So much so that now I remove the SDCard from any device I own.
So I've gone from having SDCard anxiety, to ripping the bloody thing out in every device I own. Good riddance I say.
They may get what they wish for as it's happening already, but when it arrives it they will come to realise it wasn't what they wanted.
There are already companies that allow you to re-sell your access point bandwidth. It's not rocket science. They just provide you with a router than is also a captive portal. You get to use it for free of course, but if foreigner logs into it they charge them for the bandwidth and split the fee with you. In fact most paid for captive portals operate on this basis already.
In theory this should be a win-win for everybody. It sending a byte over a land line generally costs between 1/10 and 1/100 of sending the same byte over a commercial 3G/4G network. So the mobile user gets cheap ubiquitous data and the land line owner gets to make a little money on the side.
In practice, right now, that isn't how it's working out. Somehow these captive portal operators manage to make data on these networks more expensive than the commercial 3G/4G networks. But one day someone will figure out how to make it work, and on that day a new competitor the current 3G/4G networks will arise, and it will be in the form of millions of 802.11 microcells dotted around the country. I bet they know it's coming, but don't have a clue what to do about it. They will find themselves in the same position as music publishers, newspapers, TV - except in this case it will be a case of the internet eating its own.
As I said, even though I consider this almost a long term certainty and it is what the EFF is asking for now, it isn't what the EFF actually wants. The EFF wants open access points so people can send and receive information anonymously. In this new world order every access point will be open, but every byte will be paid for, and thus tied to a credit card.
All these web sites are owned by the same people. Are the EU saying a company can't mine the data the EU says it is allowed to collect? How on earth do you even police that?
Besides, it's a non-issue, as it is under the users control anyway. If you don't want Google tying the data together use different use names on each site. It is not like it is rocket science.
Australia has no tariffs on most things. The only tax is a 10% GST. They are built in Malaysia, and shipped complete from there.
It's not like you have to wait for Microsoft. The already is an an open source shell the emulates the old Windows behaviour.
An example that has been pissing me off for weeks. A Dell M4700, with a 2.6GHz i7-3720QM, 8Gb RAM, 500 Gb HDD, IPS 1920x1080 display, 3 yr warranty.
From www.dell.com.au: AUD$3600.
From www.dell.com: $1550.
Surely they can't be serious. That's 230% more for the same thing.
When I started with Unix too long ago, the philosophy was to develop a tool box that let people customise the box to their liking. FVWM was like that. It was flexible enough to turn something that looked like Windows 95 and OSX, but configuration was not for the feint of heart.
What I expected to follow FVWM was something even more flexible, that solved the configuration file from hell problem. Something so flexible that you could have emulated the current Android, Windows 8, and OSX interfaces. So, for example, you could decide whether you wanted the applications menu bar to be per part of each window like Win 95, or have a single global one like OSX, or not display it until a button press like Android. Where you could decide whether you wanted to run every application full screen, or in its own window, or something in between split over multiple virtual desktops. FVWM already came with a collection of menu, dialogue, and panel and task manager widgets - I expected this to be expanded in the usual open source way so there were 1000's of them, most of them useless, but spurred on by the toolbox mentality that made experimentation with news ideas was easy. I expected to a fight between API's that allowed you to play with touch and multi-touch, so that someone could in principle make an upward five fingered swipe with pike launch vim, or a three fingered back swipe would invoke the browsers back function, or a two fingered circle would do an Alt-Tab, the direction depending on the direction of the circle.
But that is not what we got. In fact, the reverse happened. As others have pointed out, instead of making Gnome 1.0 more flexible, the Gnome developers decided to solve Gnome's configuration problems by removing most of the configuration. In Gnome 3 it got to the point that when I decided the fonts Gnome were using were too big even the ability to edit that was taken away. (You have to install some tweak program.) Worse than that, not only can you not configure the layout and behaviour of Gnome 3 for the platform you are working on, it seems to be optimised for a platform no one uses it on - a small screen with a keyboard ?!?!
Look boys, I'll spell it out for you - the world is NOT converging to one platform everyone uses. The reverse is happening - it is splintering. Whereas a few years ago you could safely assume all your users has a large screen, mouse and keyboard, that assumption makes no sense today. At one end people have 3 x 27" 2880x1440 screen hooked to a single computer with a mouse, keyboard and stylus input device. And then we smoothly move through a number of form factors end up at some 3" screen has a touch screen without a keyboard. In this world you can not dream up the one true interface and expect everybody to be happy with it. The very idea is insane.
In the world we have today, the Unix way of providing toolbox people can use to customise to their environment should be having it its time in the sun. Sure it's more complex than iOS, but unlike iOS it could be made to work on everything, and unlike iOS we don't have to cater to unsophisticated users. Instead we it seems we have lost the original Unix philosophy we started with, and the result is rejection by the only people who used Linux on the desktop - the people who were attracted by that philosophy.
I see most people here are recommending VNC. VNC and its brethren work, but can be very slow. A propriety alternative is Team Viewer. It is free as in beer and like VNC runs on all platforms under the sun (including Android and iOS). It is unlike VNC in that it is rock solid (I've never seen it hang), always quick enough to useable and requires no special setup to pierce NAT and firewalls.
I hope that one day open source figures our what the magic sauce is in Team View is and replicates it in VNC. Until that day arrives when I need to get shit down, I just use TeamView.