As someone who's been on the audiophile ride from the early days of strange use of the PC speaker, and the first FM synthesis boards, I can say honestly say, a few things happened that made discrete audio hardware obsolete:
1. a basic DSP became widely available, to do audio processing 2. storage became vast enough, combined with audio compression, it made more sense to just pre-record all your audio effects and music and play them back through a basic DSP. I seen this shift in games through the years, from old school methods of creating sound effects and music with code, to just playing audio files included with your game. 3. the general purpose CPU became powerful enough to do any complex signal processing and simply use the basic DSP to output the results of the processing.
Basically, in my opinion, specialize hardware is useless in the face of vast storage and general purpose CPU processing. So a basic DSP is all ya gunna need and that's what basically every PC comes with, standard now.
I'm not sure the Streisand Effect applies in this case. He's not actually trying to hide unpleasant or embarrassing aspects of his past - what he seems to want is for the article to reflect his own version of those events, or at least to contain his version (or "spin" if you prefer) in some way. And since he's a marginal figure to begin with, he's really in one of those "any publicity is good publicity" situations.
First off, we do have Streisand effect, I never heard of this guy until today. Now I'm among the millions who've now viewed this suspect wikipedia page. Second and more importantly, you're not permitted a 'side' or whatever you wanna call it on Wikipedia. It's just the facts man, no spin either direction, and from my review of the page, seemed to just present the facts. Or maybe I was reading something wrong, I dunno. Seemed pretty factual to me.
This guy is totally wrong, on so many levels. Yeah, ok, so the last 10 years we've been seeing providers buying preferential treatment from carriers. For most of us, the common Joe, we're not going to feel this, not in 10 years. It's just happening slowly, quietly. I imagine as it progresses further, smaller content providers will be seeing the preferential treatment of larger ones forcing slow downs on them. Given more time, smaller providers and startups will face crushing competition with the big guys who can afford to buy up all the bandwidth. Don't even get me started on content providers whom are also carriers.
And saying just because it's been going on for 10 years that we can't go back? WHAAATT? Is this guy insane? So just because they've been building up contracts of preferential treatment we can't say, "Hey, you need to cut that out now." No sorry, common carrier status for all carriers and be done with this issue. I call shill.
So once we create new antibiotics that can defeat these types of drug-resistant bacteria, how long will it be until a completely new resistance appears? Let's hope that in the next century our ability to engineer new antibiotics exceeds the pace that bacteria can evolve to evade them.
Nature is pretty astonishing, huh? In just 100 years, we've gone from finding antibiotics to bugs being able to defeat them. A blink of an eye in the scope of human history. I'm with ya, will it take another 100 years, or less for these bugs to evolve to resist whatever methods we discover to defeat them? I think it'll have a lot to do with what we've do with what we've learned this time. That being, we've learned that resistant bugs are completely our own darn fault.
At least for now, we're keeping up with them it seems, but.. yeah, arms race is a good choice of terms!
Stop disinfecting and over-cleaning everything. Remove the Purell crap. Let kids eat dirt.
1- It will force people to build their immune system (I'm not always sick like younger generations) 2- If you stop killing 99.999% of all bacteria, it will put an end to super-bacteria (the 0.0001% that survive and reproduce)
I *never* use any kind of medicine (unless I have no choice), I never use band aids on nicks and scratches (don't disinfect them either). I have no food intolerance, food allergies or other weird ailment.
Not to burst your bubble, and not really saying these are bad ideas, I infact condone this. Buuut... killing bacteria, being cleanly does not create drug-resistant bacteria. People not finishing their meds after they feel better is what creates nasty bugs, along with a good dose of over prescribing antibiotics. But washing your hands with a disinfectant has little to nothing to do with this problem. They're not becoming resistant to our germ killing soaps and lotions... it's the medications once the bugs get inside you that they're getting good at protecting themselves against.
But I have come to the conclusion the devs just got sick of giving us free stuff, especially when these auditors came along and got PAID to review code the TrueCrypt devs have been toiling on without pay for years.
All your NSA conspiracy theories are fun to read, but really.. I'm pretty convinced there's nothing wrong with 7.1a that will come to reveal it's fundamentally flawed and insecure.
I think I'd be giving you all the finger too if I worked 10 years without pay and some hooha's came along and got paid a bunch of dough to review my stuff and criticize it.
Move along, nothing to see here now. Just some p/o'd devs giving us all the finger.
I use AWS and I find the usage reports are pretty much up to the minute at any given time. So I think saying 'wow we didn't notice for weeks' is a bit of a stretch.
Well, off the top of my head, I know there was the raw sockets in Windows thing. My brain wants to say something about documents and Microsoft embedding something in them, or something like that, the memory of this is a bit foggy. It was a long time ago. It was also rather silly.
I do find it a little goofy he's still pushing Spinrite so much. It's not that it's a bad piece of software, many a year ago, it was pretty darn useful.. today though, using this thing is probably an epic waste of time with current drive technology.
That's all I can recall that is questionable about the guy. I think he's published a lot of useful utilities over the years and seems to be interested in spreading useful information. I certainly have no problem with him. I think others bash on him a little too hard over a few mistakes / overhype.
Steve has made some mistakes in the past and over-hyped some things, but all in the all, the man means well and is genuinely interested in the welfare of computer users. If you write him off just because he's made a few poor judgments in the past, well, that's your loss. He does have generally useful information and it's presented in a non-nerdy fashion so any bonehead can make sense of it. Usually.
This all makes sense to me, until you add in a few strange parts:
1) Why did they nuke all previous versions of the software? The disclaimer is there. There's was no need to nuke the old versions. 2) Why neuter v7.2 so it can't encrypt? Heck, why even release a neutered version? The disclaimer is there. If I was ending my work on a project, I wouldn't end it on 'here's a broken version, and I erased all the good versions.' 2) Why the unprofessional webpage, with screen shots? Screen shots take time to get, so if they spent time on this, why not spent a few extra minutes to make the page look nice as well? 3) Why nuke the TC forum on SourceForge? That makes ZERO sense.. I can't even begin to guess why ANYONE wanted the forum obliterated.
I personally don't know what to make of TrueCrypt's state... There's a lot of conflicting information and it's proving very hard to decide which parts are true and which are fabrications or speculations.
FWIW, I'm inclined to buy into the devs threw in the towel because they're just sick of dealing with it. But even that isn't a sure thing in my mind, it's just highest probability. Sick of it explains the abruptness of the site's change, as well. Doesn't really explain the other anomalies though.
But a close second is they the devs were some how coerced into removing their product from public availability. I'm not sure to what end, because obviously there's mirrors of the software, and already lots of talk about forking or developing something to do the same thing. TrueCrypt is currently the ONLY cross platform encryption solution that works so delightfully transparently on entire devices, or on file containers. TrueCrypt is also still the only crypto package with the built in 'plausible deniability' feature of hidden volumes. Yeah I know it's been shown to be fairly easy to prove the existence of a hidden volume, but you have to know to look and how to look. These features do make it uniquely positioned in the crypto software sphere.
Given the anonymous nature of the TrueCrypt developers, would we even believe someone who claimed to be a dev and gave us an explanation?
Not sure I would. I've read a lot of different articles and comments about this ordeal and I'm frankly not sure what to believe. I'm not sure if I'd believe someone if they said they were a dev.
I know we'd all laugh if the NSA came out publicly and said "we had nothing to do with it."
Oh, so, just because unchallenged, unconstitutional laws were passed, it's "legal" for the NSA to violate the constitution? Come on man, I know you're, or at least hope, you're just trying to play devils advocate here, but no matter which way you twist this, at the core, the NSA's activities are illegal. Just because we can't get a court to rule that the laws passed are unconstitutional doesn't mean it's right or even legal. We can't challenge it, they've made it difficult to do so.
I can't come up with a clever analogy, but this is exactly why some laws passed are struck down as unconstitutional. Just because a law was passed doesn't make it right, or even legitimate, and definitely not legal.
These laws empowering the NSA to do what they're doing would never stand a chance in a fair courtroom where the government wasn't allow to hide things under the guise of 'National Security', anyone with half a brain can see that.
It's pretty basic knowledge, at least to me, that if you want to ruin someone, just fabricate some pedo evidence regarding them. Law enforcement just jumps on that stuff at even the slightest suggestion someone might be up to it. Just being accused is enough to ruin most people's lives.
For the computer savvy, this is even easier to do if you can gain access to your target's computer(s). And I would suspect it's really hard to prove your innocence if accused. And in my opinion, this is one of those crimes, if accused, you are presumed guilty and must prove your innocence, not the other way around.
I really can't think of any other crime where simply possessing a photograph could result in years of prison and complete destruction of someone's livelihood. Pedo is definitely a really disgusting crime, but does the witch hunt need to be so intense against it that it facilitates using this crime against the innocent?
To be honest I'm not actually sure the NSA is breaking the law, they've got FISA rulings, the Protect America Act 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, all of which basically legitimize the known aspects of PRISM -- PRISM's who schtick is basically implementation of Title 50 USC 1881a. I don't think these laws are constitutional or legitimitate, but we'd need new law or a constitutional amendment to clear the air, because a lot of lawyers (and the SCOTUS for that matter) seem to disagree with me.
So you're trying to say... it's ok the NSA is doing what they're doing, because some unconstitutional laws were passed and have not been successfully challenged (this is an entirely different can of worms) in court as unconstitutional? Really? Please try reading this to yourself several times and think of how assbackwards this line of thinking is.
The politicos want his head on a pike... God help help him because I don't see anyone of consequence standing up for the man.
I find it interesting that a large number of people are crying for Snowden to be brought to justice, yet the squeaking about the NSA's law breaking is barely audible.
We got plenty of NSA goons breaking the law every day, and they're all right here in the US, easy to snag and prosecute. Where is the outcry for justice?
Everyone is so focused on Snowden, they're looking completely in the wrong direction. FORGET SNOWDEN, take a good damn hard look at what he's shown us, or this man has suffered for nothing, his law breaking was a complete waste. It doesn't even matter what you think of Snowden's actions. They're done, and we need to look at what he's shown us, and look very hard, keep the bright light on the NSA, Snowden is and always was irrelevant, only the information he's made public matters.
Americans don't want justice it appears, they just want someone to blame with a face and name, which the NSA seems to lack at the moment. Put some faces and names to the lawbreakers in the NSA, goddamn people what is the matter with you?
You can't have it both ways, you can't say Snowden is a traitor and the NSA is not, and advocate for punishing one and not the other.
Well, you can say Snowden was entitled to blow the whistle on PRISM, and that he shouldn't be punished for that. OTOH, he's a traitor for revealing the extent of US global surveillance, or any other programs which were not illegal. It's not unconstitutional to tap Angela Merkel's cellphone.
Again, what about the NSA? Snowden broke the law, no question there. The NSA not only broke the law, they're still at it, every day. How can you advocate punishing Snowden while the NSA continues to break the law? At least Snowden is done with his law breaking.
So what about the rest of the NSA? They're breaking the law every day, all day. What should we do about them?
I'm not for touching Snowden with any legal repercussions of his actions until the NSA is held accountable for their violations of our Constitution and Bill of Rights and outright lying to congress under oath.
You can't have it both ways, you can't say Snowden is a traitor and the NSA is not, and advocate for punishing one and not the other. The NSA is hugely more guilty of law breaking than Snowden could ever hope to be. When I see some bigwigs of the NSA behind bars, then I'll accept Snowden needs to serve some time (not life) for his supposed crime of enlightening the rest of us of the huge disregard for the law the NSA has shown.
Cloud computing is definitely cool and useful for many tasks. I've migrated all my home based server things to an EC2 instance and quite pleased with the results. I however would NEVER advocate ditching my home based General Purpose computer in exchange for a thin client and a cloud backed CPU.
It just sets a bad precedent for one. I immediately think of bad things like the GP computer going byebye and everyone having to rent time from a cloud compute CPU to do anything useful. Not to mention the surveillance implications of having all your stuff only accessible by remote (meaning others can access it by remote as well.)
Cloud computing has a place, but it is NOT a replacement for the home based General Purpose computer.
"Go to country where I can get my hand cut off for offending the authorities? No."
If you're a US resident, don't forget that you already live in a country where you can be killed without warning or due process (or made to disappear for the rest of your life) for offending the authorities. (Or even for having a name that some cretin thinks is like some other name that some other cretin put on a list).
If you consider plotting a real crime against the government or people of the US as 'offending an official', I might buy into that. Other than that, this statement is from fantasy land.
This is a pretty nice feature they added. It's much better than VNC or any other remote desktop software I've tried. About my only complaint was the mouse was a bit laggy running Skyrim.
But seeing Skyrim stream pretty much flawlessly to computer than can BARELY play 1080p videos without some chop was pretty amazing.
The internet should not fall under their purview. The FCC can regulate radio... we need something for that. We don't need them regulating the internet at all.
What we need are market forces. Competition. If the big ISPs had some they couldn't play games without threatening their market share.
That is how you regulate them. By letting customers vote with their feet.
Are you a shill or just plain stupid? The result of letting the internet do it's own thing is exactly what is the problem. They're trying to create a two tier internet and slow down people who don't pay a premium for acceptable service.
And how is it exactly we're supposed to vote with our feet when there's like 2 internet providers (in a lot of cases just 1) available to any one location?
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who's been on the audiophile ride from the early days of strange use of the PC speaker, and the first FM synthesis boards, I can say honestly say, a few things happened that made discrete audio hardware obsolete:
1. a basic DSP became widely available, to do audio processing
2. storage became vast enough, combined with audio compression, it made more sense to just pre-record all your audio effects and music and play them back through a basic DSP. I seen this shift in games through the years, from old school methods of creating sound effects and music with code, to just playing audio files included with your game.
3. the general purpose CPU became powerful enough to do any complex signal processing and simply use the basic DSP to output the results of the processing.
Basically, in my opinion, specialize hardware is useless in the face of vast storage and general purpose CPU processing. So a basic DSP is all ya gunna need and that's what basically every PC comes with, standard now.
I'm not sure the Streisand Effect applies in this case. He's not actually trying to hide unpleasant or embarrassing aspects of his past - what he seems to want is for the article to reflect his own version of those events, or at least to contain his version (or "spin" if you prefer) in some way. And since he's a marginal figure to begin with, he's really in one of those "any publicity is good publicity" situations.
First off, we do have Streisand effect, I never heard of this guy until today. Now I'm among the millions who've now viewed this suspect wikipedia page. Second and more importantly, you're not permitted a 'side' or whatever you wanna call it on Wikipedia. It's just the facts man, no spin either direction, and from my review of the page, seemed to just present the facts. Or maybe I was reading something wrong, I dunno. Seemed pretty factual to me.
This guy is totally wrong, on so many levels. Yeah, ok, so the last 10 years we've been seeing providers buying preferential treatment from carriers. For most of us, the common Joe, we're not going to feel this, not in 10 years. It's just happening slowly, quietly. I imagine as it progresses further, smaller content providers will be seeing the preferential treatment of larger ones forcing slow downs on them. Given more time, smaller providers and startups will face crushing competition with the big guys who can afford to buy up all the bandwidth. Don't even get me started on content providers whom are also carriers.
And saying just because it's been going on for 10 years that we can't go back? WHAAATT? Is this guy insane? So just because they've been building up contracts of preferential treatment we can't say, "Hey, you need to cut that out now." No sorry, common carrier status for all carriers and be done with this issue. I call shill.
So once we create new antibiotics that can defeat these types of drug-resistant bacteria, how long will it be until a completely new resistance appears? Let's hope that in the next century our ability to engineer new antibiotics exceeds the pace that bacteria can evolve to evade them.
Nature is pretty astonishing, huh? In just 100 years, we've gone from finding antibiotics to bugs being able to defeat them. A blink of an eye in the scope of human history. I'm with ya, will it take another 100 years, or less for these bugs to evolve to resist whatever methods we discover to defeat them? I think it'll have a lot to do with what we've do with what we've learned this time. That being, we've learned that resistant bugs are completely our own darn fault.
At least for now, we're keeping up with them it seems, but.. yeah, arms race is a good choice of terms!
Stop disinfecting and over-cleaning everything. Remove the Purell crap. Let kids eat dirt.
1- It will force people to build their immune system (I'm not always sick like younger generations)
2- If you stop killing 99.999% of all bacteria, it will put an end to super-bacteria (the 0.0001% that survive and reproduce)
I *never* use any kind of medicine (unless I have no choice), I never use band aids on nicks and scratches (don't disinfect them either). I have no food intolerance, food allergies or other weird ailment.
Not to burst your bubble, and not really saying these are bad ideas, I infact condone this. Buuut... killing bacteria, being cleanly does not create drug-resistant bacteria. People not finishing their meds after they feel better is what creates nasty bugs, along with a good dose of over prescribing antibiotics. But washing your hands with a disinfectant has little to nothing to do with this problem. They're not becoming resistant to our germ killing soaps and lotions... it's the medications once the bugs get inside you that they're getting good at protecting themselves against.
Speak for yourself. I recognized the value of the service they were offering, and I paid.
And you are probably very much in the minority.
But I have come to the conclusion the devs just got sick of giving us free stuff, especially when these auditors came along and got PAID to review code the TrueCrypt devs have been toiling on without pay for years.
All your NSA conspiracy theories are fun to read, but really.. I'm pretty convinced there's nothing wrong with 7.1a that will come to reveal it's fundamentally flawed and insecure.
I think I'd be giving you all the finger too if I worked 10 years without pay and some hooha's came along and got paid a bunch of dough to review my stuff and criticize it.
Move along, nothing to see here now. Just some p/o'd devs giving us all the finger.
You know AT&T's logo looks like the Death Star for a reason!
I use AWS and I find the usage reports are pretty much up to the minute at any given time. So I think saying 'wow we didn't notice for weeks' is a bit of a stretch.
Society is asking you to follow the law, not to interpret or judge its validity.
Sorry, wrong. Society is asking you drive safely and responsibly. Following the law helps, but not every time, not every circumstance.
Well, off the top of my head, I know there was the raw sockets in Windows thing. My brain wants to say something about documents and Microsoft embedding something in them, or something like that, the memory of this is a bit foggy. It was a long time ago. It was also rather silly.
I do find it a little goofy he's still pushing Spinrite so much. It's not that it's a bad piece of software, many a year ago, it was pretty darn useful.. today though, using this thing is probably an epic waste of time with current drive technology.
That's all I can recall that is questionable about the guy. I think he's published a lot of useful utilities over the years and seems to be interested in spreading useful information. I certainly have no problem with him. I think others bash on him a little too hard over a few mistakes / overhype.
Steve has made some mistakes in the past and over-hyped some things, but all in the all, the man means well and is genuinely interested in the welfare of computer users. If you write him off just because he's made a few poor judgments in the past, well, that's your loss. He does have generally useful information and it's presented in a non-nerdy fashion so any bonehead can make sense of it. Usually.
This all makes sense to me, until you add in a few strange parts:
1) Why did they nuke all previous versions of the software? The disclaimer is there. There's was no need to nuke the old versions.
2) Why neuter v7.2 so it can't encrypt? Heck, why even release a neutered version? The disclaimer is there. If I was ending my work on a project, I wouldn't end it on 'here's a broken version, and I erased all the good versions.'
2) Why the unprofessional webpage, with screen shots? Screen shots take time to get, so if they spent time on this, why not spent a few extra minutes to make the page look nice as well?
3) Why nuke the TC forum on SourceForge? That makes ZERO sense.. I can't even begin to guess why ANYONE wanted the forum obliterated.
I personally don't know what to make of TrueCrypt's state... There's a lot of conflicting information and it's proving very hard to decide which parts are true and which are fabrications or speculations.
FWIW, I'm inclined to buy into the devs threw in the towel because they're just sick of dealing with it. But even that isn't a sure thing in my mind, it's just highest probability. Sick of it explains the abruptness of the site's change, as well. Doesn't really explain the other anomalies though.
But a close second is they the devs were some how coerced into removing their product from public availability. I'm not sure to what end, because obviously there's mirrors of the software, and already lots of talk about forking or developing something to do the same thing. TrueCrypt is currently the ONLY cross platform encryption solution that works so delightfully transparently on entire devices, or on file containers. TrueCrypt is also still the only crypto package with the built in 'plausible deniability' feature of hidden volumes. Yeah I know it's been shown to be fairly easy to prove the existence of a hidden volume, but you have to know to look and how to look. These features do make it uniquely positioned in the crypto software sphere.
Given the anonymous nature of the TrueCrypt developers, would we even believe someone who claimed to be a dev and gave us an explanation?
Not sure I would. I've read a lot of different articles and comments about this ordeal and I'm frankly not sure what to believe. I'm not sure if I'd believe someone if they said they were a dev.
I know we'd all laugh if the NSA came out publicly and said "we had nothing to do with it."
Oh, so, just because unchallenged, unconstitutional laws were passed, it's "legal" for the NSA to violate the constitution? Come on man, I know you're, or at least hope, you're just trying to play devils advocate here, but no matter which way you twist this, at the core, the NSA's activities are illegal. Just because we can't get a court to rule that the laws passed are unconstitutional doesn't mean it's right or even legal. We can't challenge it, they've made it difficult to do so.
I can't come up with a clever analogy, but this is exactly why some laws passed are struck down as unconstitutional. Just because a law was passed doesn't make it right, or even legitimate, and definitely not legal.
These laws empowering the NSA to do what they're doing would never stand a chance in a fair courtroom where the government wasn't allow to hide things under the guise of 'National Security', anyone with half a brain can see that.
It's pretty basic knowledge, at least to me, that if you want to ruin someone, just fabricate some pedo evidence regarding them. Law enforcement just jumps on that stuff at even the slightest suggestion someone might be up to it. Just being accused is enough to ruin most people's lives.
For the computer savvy, this is even easier to do if you can gain access to your target's computer(s). And I would suspect it's really hard to prove your innocence if accused. And in my opinion, this is one of those crimes, if accused, you are presumed guilty and must prove your innocence, not the other way around.
I really can't think of any other crime where simply possessing a photograph could result in years of prison and complete destruction of someone's livelihood. Pedo is definitely a really disgusting crime, but does the witch hunt need to be so intense against it that it facilitates using this crime against the innocent?
To be honest I'm not actually sure the NSA is breaking the law, they've got FISA rulings, the Protect America Act 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, all of which basically legitimize the known aspects of PRISM -- PRISM's who schtick is basically implementation of Title 50 USC 1881a. I don't think these laws are constitutional or legitimitate, but we'd need new law or a constitutional amendment to clear the air, because a lot of lawyers (and the SCOTUS for that matter) seem to disagree with me.
So you're trying to say... it's ok the NSA is doing what they're doing, because some unconstitutional laws were passed and have not been successfully challenged (this is an entirely different can of worms) in court as unconstitutional? Really? Please try reading this to yourself several times and think of how assbackwards this line of thinking is.
The politicos want his head on a pike... God help help him because I don't see anyone of consequence standing up for the man.
I find it interesting that a large number of people are crying for Snowden to be brought to justice, yet the squeaking about the NSA's law breaking is barely audible.
We got plenty of NSA goons breaking the law every day, and they're all right here in the US, easy to snag and prosecute. Where is the outcry for justice?
Everyone is so focused on Snowden, they're looking completely in the wrong direction. FORGET SNOWDEN, take a good damn hard look at what he's shown us, or this man has suffered for nothing, his law breaking was a complete waste. It doesn't even matter what you think of Snowden's actions. They're done, and we need to look at what he's shown us, and look very hard, keep the bright light on the NSA, Snowden is and always was irrelevant, only the information he's made public matters.
Americans don't want justice it appears, they just want someone to blame with a face and name, which the NSA seems to lack at the moment. Put some faces and names to the lawbreakers in the NSA, goddamn people what is the matter with you?
Well, you can say Snowden was entitled to blow the whistle on PRISM, and that he shouldn't be punished for that. OTOH, he's a traitor for revealing the extent of US global surveillance, or any other programs which were not illegal. It's not unconstitutional to tap Angela Merkel's cellphone.
Again, what about the NSA? Snowden broke the law, no question there. The NSA not only broke the law, they're still at it, every day. How can you advocate punishing Snowden while the NSA continues to break the law? At least Snowden is done with his law breaking.
So what about the rest of the NSA? They're breaking the law every day, all day. What should we do about them?
I'm not for touching Snowden with any legal repercussions of his actions until the NSA is held accountable for their violations of our Constitution and Bill of Rights and outright lying to congress under oath.
You can't have it both ways, you can't say Snowden is a traitor and the NSA is not, and advocate for punishing one and not the other. The NSA is hugely more guilty of law breaking than Snowden could ever hope to be. When I see some bigwigs of the NSA behind bars, then I'll accept Snowden needs to serve some time (not life) for his supposed crime of enlightening the rest of us of the huge disregard for the law the NSA has shown.
Cloud computing is definitely cool and useful for many tasks. I've migrated all my home based server things to an EC2 instance and quite pleased with the results. I however would NEVER advocate ditching my home based General Purpose computer in exchange for a thin client and a cloud backed CPU.
It just sets a bad precedent for one. I immediately think of bad things like the GP computer going byebye and everyone having to rent time from a cloud compute CPU to do anything useful. Not to mention the surveillance implications of having all your stuff only accessible by remote (meaning others can access it by remote as well.)
Cloud computing has a place, but it is NOT a replacement for the home based General Purpose computer.
"Go to country where I can get my hand cut off for offending the authorities? No."
If you're a US resident, don't forget that you already live in a country where you can be killed without warning or due process (or made to disappear for the rest of your life) for offending the authorities. (Or even for having a name that some cretin thinks is like some other name that some other cretin put on a list).
If you consider plotting a real crime against the government or people of the US as 'offending an official', I might buy into that. Other than that, this statement is from fantasy land.
Well, on my wireless I get 2ms latency, that's usable. Depends on your wifi equipment, how many other signals are around you and such, I think.
PING braveheart (10.0.0.5) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from braveheart (10.0.0.5): icmp_req=1 ttl=128 time=2.27 ms
64 bytes from braveheart (10.0.0.5): icmp_req=2 ttl=128 time=1.92 ms
64 bytes from braveheart (10.0.0.5): icmp_req=3 ttl=128 time=1.86 ms
64 bytes from braveheart (10.0.0.5): icmp_req=4 ttl=128 time=1.89 ms
64 bytes from braveheart (10.0.0.5): icmp_req=5 ttl=128 time=1.37 ms
64 bytes from braveheart (10.0.0.5): icmp_req=6 ttl=128 time=1.40 ms
64 bytes from braveheart (10.0.0.5): icmp_req=7 ttl=128 time=1.90 ms
64 bytes from braveheart (10.0.0.5): icmp_req=8 ttl=128 time=1.80 ms
64 bytes from braveheart (10.0.0.5): icmp_req=9 ttl=128 time=1.98 ms
64 bytes from braveheart (10.0.0.5): icmp_req=10 ttl=128 time=1.83 ms
^C
--- braveheart ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9013ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.374/1.826/2.278/0.255 ms
This is a pretty nice feature they added. It's much better than VNC or any other remote desktop software I've tried. About my only complaint was the mouse was a bit laggy running Skyrim.
But seeing Skyrim stream pretty much flawlessly to computer than can BARELY play 1080p videos without some chop was pretty amazing.
+1 Steam ^.^
The internet should not fall under their purview. The FCC can regulate radio... we need something for that. We don't need them regulating the internet at all.
What we need are market forces. Competition. If the big ISPs had some they couldn't play games without threatening their market share.
That is how you regulate them. By letting customers vote with their feet.
Are you a shill or just plain stupid? The result of letting the internet do it's own thing is exactly what is the problem. They're trying to create a two tier internet and slow down people who don't pay a premium for acceptable service.
And how is it exactly we're supposed to vote with our feet when there's like 2 internet providers (in a lot of cases just 1) available to any one location?