with nearly half($70k) being for the laser lidar system.... Besides that, there's lidar systems coming out as cheap as $250 per vehicle
Where there is a will, there is a way. LIDAR systems are hideously expensive systems costing at least 5 digits, so designing one that is cheap enough to use in a vacuumcleaner would be impossible, right? Well, no. You can build one for $30. IEEE Conference Paper.
It's amazing what mass production can do to price. Just ask Apple.
It would be niftier if it would let you use it as a block cache in front of any filesystem, instead of just one located on a specially-prepared partition
That's odd, because I thought that is exactly what it did do. Naturally the storage it uses must be specially prepared, but I didn't realise the device it is caching needed any preparation. As far as I was aware you could add devices to cache at will. To remove a device you just flushed the cache - no formatting changes required. Are you saying this isn't so?
As a person who has rolled our 200 tables in their company, saying it is just about price is misleading. Yes, price is a factor. But it's also about being about being able to choose the price you want to pay.
There is no doubt in my mind that if you want a device with iPad's specs, the iPad is the best value for money. I don't know how they have done it, but in a complete turnaround Apple has become the lowest cost manufacturer. Hell, if I try to buy a laptop with the same specs as a MacBook Pro retina from Dell, it literally costs more than twice as much where I live. Unbelievable, given Apple's past reputation for being a premium manufacturer.
The problem is we don't need a tablet with the iPad's specs. We just need a reliable 10" tablet with WiFi. An Android 10" tablet may not be the same value for money as an iPad for what you get, but it is cheaper, substantially cheaper. Pair it with a Android phone and it really becomes lopsided. An iPhone - $700. An Android phone, IP67 rated, $200. And then we can write apps that run on both the phone and the tablet. You can't get a IP67 rated iPhone, let alone one for $200. That brings the price of the total system with the features we want to around 1/3 of Apple can provide.
That IP67 phone sums it up really. It's about choice, the Android ecosystem gives you huge range of choices whereas Apple doesn't. Apple will most likely continue to dominate market where the choose to play. But that is the upper end, and the upper end is always the smallest end. Numerically Android will come to dominate in tablets over time, just as they have in smart phones.
Combine Terminal IDE with Android's scripting environment and you get most scripting languages accessible from the command line. Terminal IDE for those that don't know is busybox based and provides a bash prompt, ssh client and server, telnet client and server, rsync, wget, full 101 keyboard and an IDE for java so you can do development on the phone, thus making native java apps available as scripts as well.
If you have a phone with a large screen and add a folding bluetooth keyboard1 and you can sysadmin just about anything from your pocket.
At least that statement is easily falsifiable. Even if a collision happened in the innermost hash, then that value is going to be concatenated with the salt and password before being hashed again.
Sigh.
If the inner hash collides, then it doesn't matter what the outer hash does. In the case of a collision the outer hash will always produce the same result, because operates on the same values. The salt and password are after all constants.
Yes you should, because he is right. The major weakness of a hash is a collision attack. By chaining the hash's the way you have the potential for a collision attack is the sum of the parts. A better solution might be: salt||(h(salt||password) XOR f(salt||password)).
then iterated hashes would get less secure the more iterations you use.
Maybe they are. The enhanced security comes from it taking longer compute. Chaining may actually increase the chances of a collision, but at least chaining the same hash doesn't combine the weaknesses of two hashs.
You have not given me even one reason to believe what you just claimed.
Yes, he is being an arrogant prick. He comes off as more interested in demonstrating how l33t he is, not in discussing the issue at hand.
IMHO, no, it isn't better. I am using the current stable version 3.4.3, and this is the worst version so far. It hangs while fetching email multiple times a day and connecting to GMail's IMAPS service is flaky. The UI has bugs - like displaying the source of an email using black text on a black background.
Worse, they have made some design decisions that scare me. They have moved from mbox format to maildir. That it itself is on the balance a good thing although it massively slows down full text searches. But they use one maildir for the entire local store (ie, all folders such as the Inbox, Sent,... are in the one maildir). At the same time they have removed metadata information that used to be stored in X-Evolution headers in the email out to a sqlite database.
The reason this scares me is old design had one wonderful feature - when it's metadata got corrupted, it simply rebuilt it from the mbox. Yes, waiting rebuilding this metadata could take a looong time and was a frequent source of complaints. But in exchange in 10 years Evolution hasn't lost a single byte of data. In this new design when the sqlite database gets corrupted (which it will) all the information that is stored only in it will be lost. Yuk, yuk yuk.
The final thing that irks me about Evolution is to this day it provides no way of purging individual messages. I delete messages as I deal with them. Later I archive the deleted ones in the Trash folder. Numerically most of my email is fluff - nagios messages, logs from computers, and the like. The easy way to archive is to purge all of the fluff, then copy what is left in Trash to the archive. Or it was. Since Evolution can't purge I wrote a program that did it for the mbox format. But of course that no longer works, and in the mean time Evolution hasn't provided a solution.
Typical inflammatory Slashdot story that gets it so wrong you have to wonder whether the submitter read TFA. The Slashdot summary says:
sociologists studying social networking have determined that Wikipedia is not an intellectual project based on mutual collaboration, but a war zone.
What the paper actually says:
Usually, different editors constructively extend each other’s text,
correct minor errors and mistakes until a consensual article
emerges – this is the most natural, and by far the most common,
way for a WP entry to be developed.... As we shall see, in the
English WP close to 99% of the articles result from this rather
smooth, constructive process.
The paper does say there are some articles are the subject of what appears to be permanent edit wars. But they are a tiny proportion:
it is a
credit to the WP community that such cases are kept to a
minuscule proportion of less than 100 in the entire set of 3.2 M
articles
The summary says:
The study finds that although the content does end up being accurate as a rule, it's anything but neutral or unbiased.
The paper is a study of human interaction in social media. It is not a study into the quality of Encyclopeadia's. It draws no conclusions on the accuracy, neutrality, or bias in of Wikipedia's articles whatsoever. Nonetheless when they set the scene in the introduction they quote this result from another paper:
independent studies have shown that, as early as in 2005,
science articles in WP and Encyclopedia Britannica were of
comparable quality
Australia is a good place to do this in the eye of the MPAA because they feel that they can bully and buy the result
Bully and buy the result, in Australia? Seriously? If they thought that then they don't know Australian's, their politicians or their ISP's for that matter. As has now been borne out. 4+ years, still no result, the government hasn't stepped in and the media and public opinion is lined up against them.
By the way, you might like to ask the Tobacco companies how easy it is to bully and bribe to get a result in Australia. We are the first on the planet to introduce plain packaging laws. They've tried well funded media campaigns, astroturfing campaigns where their convinced small shop owner associations to be their mouthpiece, and are currently carrying out their threat to challenge it on constitution grounds in our law courts. They brought suits against the Australian government in foreign courts over treaty violations. Again, so far, no result. The law has passed both houses and will be enforced shortly.
That cultural misunderstanding aside, you are just plain wrong. They have tried to pull this stunt in numerous places with some success in the US, France and NZ off the top of my head. In no way was Australia singled out.
Google itself, which largely went along with China's censorship in order to gain market share
I'm sorry, but I can't let this attempt to re-write history pass. Google did not "largely [go] along with China's censorship". They withdrew from Chain after the Chinese government meddling got too much for them. They withdrew from they know will almost certainly be the world's largest market on a point of principle for pete's sake - the very principle you are claiming they happily went along with.
Type 2 diabetics have had a 98% "cure" (i.e. became euglycemic) almost immediately following surgery which is due to the metabolic effect from the intestine switch. The results are so favorable that some surgeons in Europe are performing the "switch" or intestinal surgery on non-obese patients for the benefits of curing the diabetes.
The telco (unless it is third world) will have massive diesel generators
As an Australian resident I can assure you they do. We saw them in operation during cyclone Yasi last year. Those diesel generators kept chugging along right up until the exchange was flooded or they ran out of fuel. At that point the entire exchange area dropped out.
Cyclone Yasi showed us in Australia this "land line is the most reliable during an emergency" thing is just a myth. After the cyclone was over, the service techs come online again and told us what was the most reliable. The order is:
Mobile phones. Yes the local tower was often taken out, but the user could just find another one by standing on a hill. The mobile phone has a battery, which meant a candy bar phone lasted for days. The most reliable thing was a mobile phone + car + car charger + fuel for car. Nothing else came close. And surprise, surprise, most people has this, and thus remained connected during the entire cyclone. They even had an internet connection!
Land line with a POTS telephone. These lasted until something got flooded - be it the exchange or a pit in the street. That averaged a day or so. The flooding isolated many areas for a week or more. Huge amounts of the power grid were taken out including transmission lines, so in some cases it took weeks to restore it. Sparodic mobile coverage was kept up by flying in fuel for generators. Land line coverage - well much of it just had to wait.
Land line with some fancy device attached that required mains power. These died as the cyclone took out the power grid, which was in the first few minutes.
The bottom line is mobile coverage failed gracefully, meaning it never died completely. Bits of it died, capacity was reduced, but communications for important stuff like emergency SMS's was always available. Much of the land line coverage on the other hand failed catastrophically, meaning that for a short while it did better than mobile and then it died completely and utterly, for weeks.
Quality will be about the same unless wideband VoIP is deployed (almost no one has done that)
With the NBN Australia is replacing POTS with wideband VOIP, which is rather pertinant considering Australia is the country we are talking about here.
And VOIP doesn't have to be wideband. The price should plumet. Narrowband VOIP is just a 64Kb/s stream with QoS. A 1 minute voice call chews up $0.0001 of data, even at Australia's inflated prices for data. Currently the telco's here charge far more than 10,000 times that. The justification is I think they have to pay for all the switching gear in the exchanges, and the data has to flow through their equipment. Under the NBN all that changes. The currently analogue switching gear will become land fill - replaced by internet routers. SIP does not require the data to be pushed through the telco - the telco's role is to set up a RTP steam that goes directly between the end points. The voice provider get reduced to being a lookup service so one party can discover the IP address for a phone number.
Then there are the other features provided by SIP - like transferring calls, conference calls, video, and the ability to use your mobile phone as a handset while in the house. Copper provides none of this.
In other words contrary to what you say VOIP does indeed provide lots of advantages over analogue. It is orders of magnitude cheaper, while providing many more features.
Developers at Gnome have reduced the entire UI to a single button and they're even trying to get rid of that.
Yes, they are. But since they haven't achieved that yet, they took an interim step: to eliminate all confusion about where to press the button, all buttons are now full screen.
Yes, there were a lot of "rogue" DHCP servers at LCA, although a better term might be miss-configured because I am almost certain it wasn't deliberate. But the story neglects to mention the reason. Attendees were invited to set up wireless access points because the accommodation didn't provide wireless. There were I guess 20 or 30 units, and I be surprised if every one of those units didn't have at least 1 AP set up by a community minded resident. It is inevitable that some of those will have forgotten to turn DHCP off, or perhaps plugged the internet connection into the switch rather than the upstream port on the router.
This is avoidable. LCA owns some 50 or so access points, which have been deployed in the past to supply wireless to the accommodation. Doing so means the attendees don't bother unpacking their access points, and the rogue DHCP problem goes away. However, deploying those access points takes a substantial amount of time and organisation. LCA is run by volunteers. So they have a tradeoff - they can put in a substantial amount of work and the problem largely goes away, or deal with the problem during the conference as it arises. As LCA attendees are a pretty sophisticated bunch networking wise, either way works well enough.
The one thing that doesn't make any sense is blaming the attendees, which is the way this story tries to slant it. That is like leaving the nappy off the baby and then blaming it for the piss on the carpet. The consequences of not supplying wireless are entirely predictable. Reasonable adults either supply wireless, or accept the consequences and don't whinge about it.
A more interesting topic of discussion is the collapse of the network in the accommodation on Friday night. In hindsight the cause is obvious. For the second LCA in a row they got all most of the conference video's up before the conference closed. Come Friday night many attendees decided to download huge quantities of them, the usual reason given being "so I have something to watch on the way home". It was a really good idea actually - LCA this year had 4 streams, and inevitably people ended up missing what in hindsight were "must see" talks. The problem was the link between the residences and LCA simply could not cope with the traffic.
Again, that could have been solved. Indeed it was solved at LCA 2011 using DNS tricks. In that year a copy of the videos was put on a server in the residences, and FQDN for the video server resolved to that server for the residences only. Or perhaps enabling torrents for the videos would have worked well enough. As it was, internet connectivity was almost non-existent Friday night, and that caused howls of anguish - far more anguish than the rogue DHCP servers.
You know where else Government got involved in the 1960s. . Health care via medicare.
Yes, well there is one little problem with this "governments are the problem". And that is just about other place on the planet gets better bang for the buck in their heath care than the US, and they do it by using more government regulation, not less.
You are right though. The government is the problem. But it is not everybodies government. It's yours. Most governments on the planet seem to be able to design systems that aren't rorted by corporates. The US - you lot seem to specialise in corporate welfare. And its not small business corporate welfare either. It's always the big end of town. Your banks fuck up and send the economy to hell and what do you do - bail out the bloody banks. You establish a student loan system and rather than forcing them to provide more education for the extra dollars, what do you do - allow them to rake off the extra money by charging more. You design new public health insurance system and who do you let write the rules - the bloody health insurance industry. I wonder who they will favour? The way your industrial complex sucks off the teat of the government paid for military is so bad your politicians invented a new word for it.
Then the cretins among you then say "our government is too big, too strong, running too much of the country, we must chop it down to size." Well it may be too big. But it's not because it's too strong. It's because it's too weak, and continually allows itself to be bought with corporate money. It's called capitalistic cronyism - the person with the most money gets to buy the most government influence. If you want to see it in action now, just look at how the legal fraternity is manipulating patent law. When that happens what you end up with is what we see in the US today - the people with the most money ensuring the bulk of the taxes end up in their pockets. When there aren't enough taxes to satisfy your corporate overloads, what do they manipulate your government into doing - borrowing more. To bail them out of all things. It's beyond belief.
It's time you guys woke up to yourselves and go got yourselves a real democracy. You know, one where votes aren't bought by the person who can spend the most on advertising. They have to be earned, by putting money in the pockets of the voter.
What you are possibly missing is that Linux doesn't use much hardware in todays terms. OpenWrt will happily run Linux plus a user space in 16M. That 16M gives you real time multitasking, IPv4, IPv6 and CIFS network stack, firewall, QOS, flash, HDD and fat, file systems, ACL's, 80211 stack, bluetooth stack, USB drivers, memory management, a mature development environment with every language known to man.
On today's hardware 16M is nothing, even Nokia's current S40 phones have 16M. In fact they (eg a Nokia C3) have 128M. Of that, Linux + the basic user space stuff uses less than 10%. In view of all that, the question isn't why do the use Linux for new development, the question is how on earth could you justify not using it?
Yes, the current term is ridiculous, but so is 10 years!
The economic argument behind copyright is we get more software, books, movies or whatever because of it. The balance becomes one of making copyright long enough to the producers of works so they an economic incentive return to produce more works, but no so long that they earn money from old works and have no produce not ones. We are after all a society built upon continual incremental improvement of things we have built before. Interfering with someone's ability to build on what others have done has to be done with a very light hand, otherwise it will reduce the rate on innovation and improvement rather than increase it.
A good for guess at how long we should afford a work protection is its economic lifetime - ie the time it takes them to haul in the bulk of its income. For movies and books that is under 2 years. How long do you think Microsoft should have to get to each back its development effort into XP? 10 years sounds reasonable to me. Ditto for those CAD packages. It we had 10 year copyright terms, it's probably that (a) the people who developed the original ones would have earned a substantial return and (b) many more people would have access to them now. That is the balance you want to strike. Bear in mind you need very little economic incentive to drive the production of software - open source shows us that.
The N9 was "running" MeeGo when it was due to be released in September 2010. Running is in quotes because it started swapping before it got to run a line of Qt code.
The introduction of MeeGo had no impact.
The MeeGo base it was standing on had to be thrown away. These one step forward two steps back manoeuvres take time to execute.
Key takeaway is that hiring open source evangelists to design a mobile OS(i.e Meego) failed and they wouldn't have had enough devices running it.
That is clearly bullshit. They didn't fail, as they have now delivered the N9.
They were late. They weren't late because of open source, they were late because the changed higher ups changed direction one too many times with the dropping of Maemo for MeeGo. But nonetheless they delivered. And they delivered long before Microsoft. They had a working Maemo based phone ready for the market place before Mango was Released To Manufacturing. If they wanted to ship a fleet of new phones ASAP, they should have done it using their home grown Maemo platform.
People from Microsoft understand the meaning of the term late better than most because they are familiar with Vista. It is a setback, not a disaster. What changed it from a setback to a disaster wasn't open source or engineering decisions, it was the board loosing their faith in the own company's engineering culture - something that Microsoft would never do. They hired a CEO that reflected that opinion and promptly declared declared all their products to be shit. Guess what? Their customers believed them.
It will be a great a lesson for business schools: it is indeed possible to destroy one of the worlds largest tech companies in 24 months or so. All it takes is a board consisting entirely of spineless, risk adverse morons who are willing to abandoning everything their company is built on and flee to the first exit offered as soon as the going gets tough.
Slashdot Mirror
Err, I think you summed up my point nicely ?!?
Where there is a will, there is a way. LIDAR systems are hideously expensive systems costing at least 5 digits, so designing one that is cheap enough to use in a vacuum cleaner would be impossible, right? Well, no. You can build one for $30. IEEE Conference Paper.
It's amazing what mass production can do to price. Just ask Apple.
That's odd, because I thought that is exactly what it did do. Naturally the storage it uses must be specially prepared, but I didn't realise the device it is caching needed any preparation. As far as I was aware you could add devices to cache at will. To remove a device you just flushed the cache - no formatting changes required. Are you saying this isn't so?
As a person who has rolled our 200 tables in their company, saying it is just about price is misleading. Yes, price is a factor. But it's also about being about being able to choose the price you want to pay.
There is no doubt in my mind that if you want a device with iPad's specs, the iPad is the best value for money. I don't know how they have done it, but in a complete turnaround Apple has become the lowest cost manufacturer. Hell, if I try to buy a laptop with the same specs as a MacBook Pro retina from Dell, it literally costs more than twice as much where I live. Unbelievable, given Apple's past reputation for being a premium manufacturer.
The problem is we don't need a tablet with the iPad's specs. We just need a reliable 10" tablet with WiFi. An Android 10" tablet may not be the same value for money as an iPad for what you get, but it is cheaper, substantially cheaper. Pair it with a Android phone and it really becomes lopsided. An iPhone - $700. An Android phone, IP67 rated, $200. And then we can write apps that run on both the phone and the tablet. You can't get a IP67 rated iPhone, let alone one for $200. That brings the price of the total system with the features we want to around 1/3 of Apple can provide.
That IP67 phone sums it up really. It's about choice, the Android ecosystem gives you huge range of choices whereas Apple doesn't. Apple will most likely continue to dominate market where the choose to play. But that is the upper end, and the upper end is always the smallest end. Numerically Android will come to dominate in tablets over time, just as they have in smart phones.
+1 for Terminal IDE.
Combine Terminal IDE with Android's scripting environment and you get most scripting languages accessible from the command line. Terminal IDE for those that don't know is busybox based and provides a bash prompt, ssh client and server, telnet client and server, rsync, wget, full 101 keyboard and an IDE for java so you can do development on the phone, thus making native java apps available as scripts as well.
If you have a phone with a large screen and add a folding bluetooth keyboard 1 and you can sysadmin just about anything from your pocket.
Does this mean the difference between Android malware and iOS malware is you know what information the Android malware is stealing?
Sigh.
If the inner hash collides, then it doesn't matter what the outer hash does. In the case of a collision the outer hash will always produce the same result, because operates on the same values. The salt and password are after all constants.
Yes you should, because he is right. The major weakness of a hash is a collision attack. By chaining the hash's the way you have the potential for a collision attack is the sum of the parts. A better solution might be: salt||(h(salt||password) XOR f(salt||password)).
Maybe they are. The enhanced security comes from it taking longer compute. Chaining may actually increase the chances of a collision, but at least chaining the same hash doesn't combine the weaknesses of two hashs.
Yes, he is being an arrogant prick. He comes off as more interested in demonstrating how l33t he is, not in discussing the issue at hand.
IMHO, no, it isn't better. I am using the current stable version 3.4.3, and this is the worst version so far. It hangs while fetching email multiple times a day and connecting to GMail's IMAPS service is flaky. The UI has bugs - like displaying the source of an email using black text on a black background.
Worse, they have made some design decisions that scare me. They have moved from mbox format to maildir. That it itself is on the balance a good thing although it massively slows down full text searches. But they use one maildir for the entire local store (ie, all folders such as the Inbox, Sent, ... are in the one maildir). At the same time they have removed metadata information that used to be stored in X-Evolution headers in the email out to a sqlite database.
The reason this scares me is old design had one wonderful feature - when it's metadata got corrupted, it simply rebuilt it from the mbox. Yes, waiting rebuilding this metadata could take a looong time and was a frequent source of complaints. But in exchange in 10 years Evolution hasn't lost a single byte of data. In this new design when the sqlite database gets corrupted (which it will) all the information that is stored only in it will be lost. Yuk, yuk yuk.
The final thing that irks me about Evolution is to this day it provides no way of purging individual messages. I delete messages as I deal with them. Later I archive the deleted ones in the Trash folder. Numerically most of my email is fluff - nagios messages, logs from computers, and the like. The easy way to archive is to purge all of the fluff, then copy what is left in Trash to the archive. Or it was. Since Evolution can't purge I wrote a program that did it for the mbox format. But of course that no longer works, and in the mean time Evolution hasn't provided a solution.
Typical inflammatory Slashdot story that gets it so wrong you have to wonder whether the submitter read TFA. The Slashdot summary says:
What the paper actually says:
The paper does say there are some articles are the subject of what appears to be permanent edit wars. But they are a tiny proportion:
The summary says:
The paper is a study of human interaction in social media. It is not a study into the quality of Encyclopeadia's. It draws no conclusions on the accuracy, neutrality, or bias in of Wikipedia's articles whatsoever. Nonetheless when they set the scene in the introduction they quote this result from another paper:
Bully and buy the result, in Australia? Seriously? If they thought that then they don't know Australian's, their politicians or their ISP's for that matter. As has now been borne out. 4+ years, still no result, the government hasn't stepped in and the media and public opinion is lined up against them.
By the way, you might like to ask the Tobacco companies how easy it is to bully and bribe to get a result in Australia. We are the first on the planet to introduce plain packaging laws. They've tried well funded media campaigns, astroturfing campaigns where their convinced small shop owner associations to be their mouthpiece, and are currently carrying out their threat to challenge it on constitution grounds in our law courts. They brought suits against the Australian government in foreign courts over treaty violations. Again, so far, no result. The law has passed both houses and will be enforced shortly.
That cultural misunderstanding aside, you are just plain wrong. They have tried to pull this stunt in numerous places with some success in the US, France and NZ off the top of my head. In no way was Australia singled out.
I'm sorry, but I can't let this attempt to re-write history pass. Google did not "largely [go] along with China's censorship". They withdrew from Chain after the Chinese government meddling got too much for them. They withdrew from they know will almost certainly be the world's largest market on a point of principle for pete's sake - the very principle you are claiming they happily went along with.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodenum:
80% of obese people who had gastric bypass surgery (bypassing the duodenum) were cured of their type 2 diabetes
And from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodenal_switch:
Type 2 diabetics have had a 98% "cure" (i.e. became euglycemic) almost immediately following surgery which is due to the metabolic effect from the intestine switch. The results are so favorable that some surgeons in Europe are performing the "switch" or intestinal surgery on non-obese patients for the benefits of curing the diabetes.
As an Australian resident I can assure you they do. We saw them in operation during cyclone Yasi last year. Those diesel generators kept chugging along right up until the exchange was flooded or they ran out of fuel. At that point the entire exchange area dropped out.
Cyclone Yasi showed us in Australia this "land line is the most reliable during an emergency" thing is just a myth. After the cyclone was over, the service techs come online again and told us what was the most reliable. The order is:
The bottom line is mobile coverage failed gracefully, meaning it never died completely. Bits of it died, capacity was reduced, but communications for important stuff like emergency SMS's was always available. Much of the land line coverage on the other hand failed catastrophically, meaning that for a short while it did better than mobile and then it died completely and utterly, for weeks.
With the NBN Australia is replacing POTS with wideband VOIP, which is rather pertinant considering Australia is the country we are talking about here.
And VOIP doesn't have to be wideband. The price should plumet. Narrowband VOIP is just a 64Kb/s stream with QoS. A 1 minute voice call chews up $0.0001 of data, even at Australia's inflated prices for data. Currently the telco's here charge far more than 10,000 times that. The justification is I think they have to pay for all the switching gear in the exchanges, and the data has to flow through their equipment. Under the NBN all that changes. The currently analogue switching gear will become land fill - replaced by internet routers. SIP does not require the data to be pushed through the telco - the telco's role is to set up a RTP steam that goes directly between the end points. The voice provider get reduced to being a lookup service so one party can discover the IP address for a phone number.
Then there are the other features provided by SIP - like transferring calls, conference calls, video, and the ability to use your mobile phone as a handset while in the house. Copper provides none of this.
In other words contrary to what you say VOIP does indeed provide lots of advantages over analogue. It is orders of magnitude cheaper, while providing many more features.
Yes, they are. But since they haven't achieved that yet, they took an interim step: to eliminate all confusion about where to press the button, all buttons are now full screen.
http://www.landfallnavigation.com/memss.html
Yes, there were a lot of "rogue" DHCP servers at LCA, although a better term might be miss-configured because I am almost certain it wasn't deliberate. But the story neglects to mention the reason. Attendees were invited to set up wireless access points because the accommodation didn't provide wireless. There were I guess 20 or 30 units, and I be surprised if every one of those units didn't have at least 1 AP set up by a community minded resident. It is inevitable that some of those will have forgotten to turn DHCP off, or perhaps plugged the internet connection into the switch rather than the upstream port on the router.
This is avoidable. LCA owns some 50 or so access points, which have been deployed in the past to supply wireless to the accommodation. Doing so means the attendees don't bother unpacking their access points, and the rogue DHCP problem goes away. However, deploying those access points takes a substantial amount of time and organisation. LCA is run by volunteers. So they have a tradeoff - they can put in a substantial amount of work and the problem largely goes away, or deal with the problem during the conference as it arises. As LCA attendees are a pretty sophisticated bunch networking wise, either way works well enough.
The one thing that doesn't make any sense is blaming the attendees, which is the way this story tries to slant it. That is like leaving the nappy off the baby and then blaming it for the piss on the carpet. The consequences of not supplying wireless are entirely predictable. Reasonable adults either supply wireless, or accept the consequences and don't whinge about it.
A more interesting topic of discussion is the collapse of the network in the accommodation on Friday night. In hindsight the cause is obvious. For the second LCA in a row they got all most of the conference video's up before the conference closed. Come Friday night many attendees decided to download huge quantities of them, the usual reason given being "so I have something to watch on the way home". It was a really good idea actually - LCA this year had 4 streams, and inevitably people ended up missing what in hindsight were "must see" talks. The problem was the link between the residences and LCA simply could not cope with the traffic.
Again, that could have been solved. Indeed it was solved at LCA 2011 using DNS tricks. In that year a copy of the videos was put on a server in the residences, and FQDN for the video server resolved to that server for the residences only. Or perhaps enabling torrents for the videos would have worked well enough. As it was, internet connectivity was almost non-existent Friday night, and that caused howls of anguish - far more anguish than the rogue DHCP servers.
I'll see that graph with wriggly lines and raise you an animated graph with wriggly lines:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2011/11/16/it-hasnt-warmed-since%E2%80%A6/
Yes, well there is one little problem with this "governments are the problem". And that is just about other place on the planet gets better bang for the buck in their heath care than the US, and they do it by using more government regulation, not less.
You are right though. The government is the problem. But it is not everybodies government. It's yours. Most governments on the planet seem to be able to design systems that aren't rorted by corporates. The US - you lot seem to specialise in corporate welfare. And its not small business corporate welfare either. It's always the big end of town. Your banks fuck up and send the economy to hell and what do you do - bail out the bloody banks. You establish a student loan system and rather than forcing them to provide more education for the extra dollars, what do you do - allow them to rake off the extra money by charging more. You design new public health insurance system and who do you let write the rules - the bloody health insurance industry. I wonder who they will favour? The way your industrial complex sucks off the teat of the government paid for military is so bad your politicians invented a new word for it.
Then the cretins among you then say "our government is too big, too strong, running too much of the country, we must chop it down to size." Well it may be too big. But it's not because it's too strong. It's because it's too weak, and continually allows itself to be bought with corporate money. It's called capitalistic cronyism - the person with the most money gets to buy the most government influence. If you want to see it in action now, just look at how the legal fraternity is manipulating patent law. When that happens what you end up with is what we see in the US today - the people with the most money ensuring the bulk of the taxes end up in their pockets. When there aren't enough taxes to satisfy your corporate overloads, what do they manipulate your government into doing - borrowing more. To bail them out of all things. It's beyond belief.
It's time you guys woke up to yourselves and go got yourselves a real democracy. You know, one where votes aren't bought by the person who can spend the most on advertising. They have to be earned, by putting money in the pockets of the voter.
What you are possibly missing is that Linux doesn't use much hardware in todays terms. OpenWrt will happily run Linux plus a user space in 16M. That 16M gives you real time multitasking, IPv4, IPv6 and CIFS network stack, firewall, QOS, flash, HDD and fat, file systems, ACL's, 80211 stack, bluetooth stack, USB drivers, memory management, a mature development environment with every language known to man.
On today's hardware 16M is nothing, even Nokia's current S40 phones have 16M. In fact they (eg a Nokia C3) have 128M. Of that, Linux + the basic user space stuff uses less than 10%. In view of all that, the question isn't why do the use Linux for new development, the question is how on earth could you justify not using it?
The economic argument behind copyright is we get more software, books, movies or whatever because of it. The balance becomes one of making copyright long enough to the producers of works so they an economic incentive return to produce more works, but no so long that they earn money from old works and have no produce not ones. We are after all a society built upon continual incremental improvement of things we have built before. Interfering with someone's ability to build on what others have done has to be done with a very light hand, otherwise it will reduce the rate on innovation and improvement rather than increase it.
A good for guess at how long we should afford a work protection is its economic lifetime - ie the time it takes them to haul in the bulk of its income. For movies and books that is under 2 years. How long do you think Microsoft should have to get to each back its development effort into XP? 10 years sounds reasonable to me. Ditto for those CAD packages. It we had 10 year copyright terms, it's probably that (a) the people who developed the original ones would have earned a substantial return and (b) many more people would have access to them now. That is the balance you want to strike. Bear in mind you need very little economic incentive to drive the production of software - open source shows us that.
I suspect we have a budding new Utilitarian here, only he doesn't know it yet. Welcome to the club.
The N9 was "running" MeeGo when it was due to be released in September 2010. Running is in quotes because it started swapping before it got to run a line of Qt code.
The MeeGo base it was standing on had to be thrown away. These one step forward two steps back manoeuvres take time to execute.
That is clearly bullshit. They didn't fail, as they have now delivered the N9.
They were late. They weren't late because of open source, they were late because the changed higher ups changed direction one too many times with the dropping of Maemo for MeeGo. But nonetheless they delivered. And they delivered long before Microsoft. They had a working Maemo based phone ready for the market place before Mango was Released To Manufacturing. If they wanted to ship a fleet of new phones ASAP, they should have done it using their home grown Maemo platform.
People from Microsoft understand the meaning of the term late better than most because they are familiar with Vista. It is a setback, not a disaster. What changed it from a setback to a disaster wasn't open source or engineering decisions, it was the board loosing their faith in the own company's engineering culture - something that Microsoft would never do. They hired a CEO that reflected that opinion and promptly declared declared all their products to be shit. Guess what? Their customers believed them.
It will be a great a lesson for business schools: it is indeed possible to destroy one of the worlds largest tech companies in 24 months or so. All it takes is a board consisting entirely of spineless, risk adverse morons who are willing to abandoning everything their company is built on and flee to the first exit offered as soon as the going gets tough.