You're probably right, everyone at or below the poverty level deserves to be there. So it's not useful to feel sorry for them or try to help them get out of the situation.
I'm not arguing that no one is like this, but I'm arguing that there are probably a lot more than you realize. Unfortunately the people that get noticed are the people who abuse the situation, and as a result they make it harder for the other people who are in that situation through misfortune or who only have the natural talents to land a minimum wage job (which is substantially below the poverty level).
Watch In Pursuit of Happyness. Although everything turns out ok in the end, it's not a feel-good movie, and that was not its point. The point of the movie is to show how it is that you can try your absolute hardest and still fail through misfortune and bad decisions (which were only identifiable as bad in hind sight). If there weren't programs to help this guy get out of the situation he was in, he would not have been able to, as it was he had to risk everything he had, small as it was, on a long shot, and he got lucky. This is a true story.
Update: I checked this out on my desktop, and there *was* a filter in Adblock to block this specifically. I had actually just installed Adblock on the machine I'm writing from about 20 minutes before finding this story - it's a new machine. It didn't have the filter. But my desktop which has been around for a while, did have that "adblock slander" entry in its list. Figuring my laptop probably was a more recent filter set what with being only at most 20 minutes old, I updated the filter on my desktop, and lo and behold the page appeared.
So I guess the guy who maintains at least EasyList USA added it as a slander entry, then took it back out some time earlier today.
However it does also look like their server is up and down a lot, I'm getting a number of refused connections and having to make each attempt multiple times. Go Slashdot.
dang, I should have proofed this, there's a big chunk in the middle missing because I did "for (x = 0; x < node.attributes.length..." and forgot to escape the <. Silly me for wanting to get it out before going to work.
Adblock only blocks what it's told to block. You may subscribe to filters and those filters may include patterns which block this site, but you can see the list if you like, just click on Adblock options. Mine doesn't seem to have any filters that target this site, and it doesn't load for me. Maybe a slashdotting, maybe adblock is blocking it. I don't care enough to switch browsers to find out.
You'd better have something that I actively want in order to convince me I should go out of my way to accommodate you, and I'd better be convinced of that before I visit your site. If you have something I want that badly, chances are good it's something I want to buy that only you sell, in which case you are turning away business if you fail to convince me to go out of my way for you; and you're doing this in order to serve ads at me; hence instead of being happy enough with my sale, you want to eek out 0.1% additional by serving me ads, and for this you're turning away a large portion of a market share that is between 10-25% depending on your industry.
If the only thing you have to offer me are words, then I guarantee that I don't want to read it enough to make me fire up a different browser just for you, there is no word-smithing site today that I wouldn't stop visiting if it did something as annoying as this, in fact most would lose me for doing anything even less annoying.
Flex isn't forcibly strongly typed, but it gives you the option of operating that way if you like. You can declare types on all your function returns, parameters, and local variables, and any variable you do declare a type for it will be enforced upon, and the IDE will also give you object insight (typing the variable name and a dot will give you a dropdown of the properties and methods, attaching to an event on this object will give you a dropdown of the events on the object).
Flex's IDE is an Eclipse plugin, and Flex is a compiled language. It is able to take advantage of Eclipse's refactoring tools, and it has an integrated debugger which allows you to set break points, pause execution, examine the stack and values of variables at run time. It has a robust exception system, and it never just 'stops' unless you have compiled it without the debugging information (which is what you would typically do only for a production compilation in order to reduce size and make it less likely that someone will tinker with the inner workings of your application - the same as compiling without symbols for other languages).
My comment about IE is not to suggest that the IE team sucks, therefore the Silverlight team will suck. Instead it's my observation that the browser market was heating up, and Microsoft saw this as a threat to their desktop ubiquity. They realized that if all the important things people do are web-based instead of desktop software, then the browser IS the operating system. They needed to make sure they were the dominant player in this arena so that it wouldn't be possible for people to swap out their OS. As soon as they achieved market dominance on the browser, they stopped working on it. Because they laid dormant for so long, another major player crept in and started to challenge them again. This then is the only thing that prompted them to fire up the forge of development again, and they produced a very very minor upgrade which focused almost exclusively on the user interface. People want tabs, people got tabs, this is what will keep PEOPLE on the browser, they don't care if you can do "for (var x = 0; x if there's some deal breaking application which is Windows only.
They also know that since Flex is cross platform, they can't get away with offering such a superficially inferior product (in that anyone can point directly at it and observe it as a deficiency with Silverlight, not to say that cross-platform isn't important), so they must develop it cross platform. They've managed to convince the Mono guys that they should donate their time to Microsoft to support this.
If Microsoft succeeds in this arena, development will peter off once they achieve dominance since they don't want to be in this arena, they just have to be, and as a result they will have lost all motivation to proceed forward with development on it. They'll end up making some releases to.NET which aren't supported cross-platform, and x-plat Silverlight releases supporting it will lag far behind to the point of eventually just being a stale static project.
I think that competition is healthy in all markets, but Microsoft is not a competitor for the people, they are a competitor for their desktop. Flex is an indirect but very significant competitor to the desktop. The desktop is not a competitor to flex though, so this competition is one-way, and Microsoft needed to enter the arena only to be able to take up the challenge which would otherwise be another substantial chink in the desktop market share armor. Each chink makes more and more developers realize that they need to not just assume Microsoft, and they need to accommodate other platforms. So each chink cracks and spreads. A chink in the armor here and there and suddenly there's enough x-plat momentum that Microsoft loses their bread and butter - the OS.
(sorry for any typos or unusually formed sentences, I'm sending this before heading off to work, and don't have time to proof it)
Actually the spit-and-duct-tape thing is not quite right. They built a rich language (Actionscript is very java-esque) and then out of that grew user controls. I find it laudible that their user controls are written in Flash & Actionscript, because it means that the language is mature enough to support advancing itself without having to update the player to get better controls. You can get access to the full source for their user controls, and you can extend those user controls (naturally via the extends keyword) to create your own custom controls.
They built these controls slowly over time, and as the language got more advanced, so did the controls.
I haven't seen silverlight's inner workings, but based on Microsoft's track record for such things, I'm going to guess that their controls are at least partially native (did Microsoft ever fix the fact that <select> boxes render on a different canvas than the page, so you can't put divs that completely or partially cover them?), and the result will be less overall flexibility since if this is the case, even Microsoft won't have found their own platform sufficient to their needs, and needed to cheat to get it done.
Its a bad design, but the whole shuttle is an awful design.
Interesting perspective. Would you elaborate on what you would do differently that the hundreds of top-end engineers at NASA hadn't thought of? I'm guessing they want to know too.
I don't know, I think that you could subtly change the color or darkness of text or its background to indicate how recently it has been modified. Either as a gradient where black is 2+ weeks old, and dark blue is 1 day old, or else simply highlight any text which had been recently modified, particularly if a certain article or paragraph has had a lot of activity recently relative to the amount of activity on that article (indicating an edit war).
A lot of people say, "I'm ok with it if it reduces the price of the game," but I haven't heard a single game company offering this as a motivation. No one has said, "Our development costs are rising, so to offset the load of this on the consumer, we're going to start offering a version of the game with advertising that costs less." No, all of the game developer community discussion has been surrounding whether or not gamers would accept the advertising. This is only a supplemental revenue stream which will degrade gaming experience without offering anything back to us, the gamers.
I think they under-estimate the willpower of the up and coming generation to avoid advertising though. It won't be long at all until someone has an adblock-style product for gaming. Perhaps it locks games processes down to certain ports (only the ports necessary for online play). If they deliver advertising over those ports, then expect it to modify the process memory at run-time to purge advertisements. Now that is a service I would pay for.
I think they'd probably alienate their existing advertisers and lose that income, but it would take a while before the people interested in such content started purchasing the paper, and even longer before advertisers interested in running adverts in their newly formatted publication were convinced that it would be of much value.
Actually probably a better approach would be if newspapers started having a real tech section (and not just a "here are the latest gadgets" which some papers are doing now), maybe starting as part of the Sunday paper, and expanding to weekdays as interest builds.
I think most people misunderstand defcon, including a lot of its attendees. The purpose is not to be l33t crackers as much as it is to know more than the would-be crackers so you can protect yourself from them, sort of a beating-them-at-their-own-game thing. Defcon is a security conference, not an insecurity conference.
So an under cover anybody, be they reporter or FBI, or whatever, is completely contrary to the point of the conference, and of any conference, this one is the one where you would want to out such people, it only reinforces the point of it all.
Automatix is a good attempt, and I'm sure for some users it's a real godsend, but for me it royally screwed some things up. I'll admit I'm not your average user, I have been known to go download newer.deb's of files from the web and the like (a few very active projects the distro just can't keep up with, and I love active projects). For example, I couldn't figure out for the longest time why one of my drivers would just never load unless I manually loaded it. It turns out that it had been blacklisted. Not in/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, but in some other/etc file (whose name I now forget, but doesn't contain the word "blacklist"). Each time I rebooted, the driver file was physically missing from the disk, and I had to uninstall and reinstall linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r` in order to get the file back (even an apt-get install --reinstall wasn't sufficient, had to be apt-get remove, apt-get install).
After MUCH unsuccessful googling, I decided to see if there was some script which was doing this to me, and I "grep -R drivername/", causing me to discover that file in/etc which said something like: # drivername automatically blacklisted by automatix blacklist=drivername
There were a couple of other weird things, and that box just never quite got right again until I reinstalled from scratch (which is why you want to have/home on its own partition! Makes it very easy to do a fresh install and keep everything important!)
It's the unfortunate consequence of programs that try to do too much thinking for you, but which are attached on after the fact.
I think it'd be great if a distribution could present all of the standard legal disclaimers as a list during the install process so that you can one-click OK them all and the system could just start at a standard state. It would be fantastic if you could just have a fully functional system after the install is complete so that you can pass it off to your grandmother ready to go. Those scary legal disclaimers after the fact are confusing and look like errors to people who don't know much about technology.
That's an interesting chart. Here is another interesting chart comparing Microsoft vs Ubuntu. I don't want to read too much into it, but there is a decided decline in Microsoft which is inverse to the rise of Ubuntu.
Not to detract from your point, but our guild had a lot of fun taking level 70's into old world dungeons to help them with lock and pally mount quests. Frankly you really only need one well-geared level 70, or two normally geared level 70s to solo old world dungeons. Also this turns out to be pretty good experience for the level 60.
We ran MantisBT on a Windows 2003 server at my previous job. Added 30 or so extra lines to the config file which took the user's NT logon (automatically authenticated with WIA in IIS), looked them up in the user table, if they weren't present, did an LDAP call to find out who they are and add them to the database automatically, and finally set up the session to make them logged in. It made it seamless (though new users would have to visit the site once to get their account created in order to be added to any projects).
ntfs-3g is pretty nice; for a while I was using it to read and write my Windows partition from Linux (so that it could be my shared disk space) but I'll caution you that it is low on performance. I played games under Transgaming's Cedega from my Ubuntu install, and found very little need to ever reboot into Windows. But I wanted to keep my game data on the Windows disk in case a game ever needed a patch or something that Cedega wasn't able to complete. So I ran the games right off the Windows partition.
I digress, long story short, I discovered that I got a significant performance increase in my gaming when I copied my game data over to ext3. For example, Warcraft off ntfs-3g took between 15 and 20 seconds to make it to the login screen (with a cpu being pegged the whole time). On ext3 it's about 2-3 seconds, and the CPU is actually pretty quiet before it enters full screen.
You need a box where you have the appropriate permissions. For myself, I have several dedicated servers hosted at ThePlanet in Texas. Because they're dedicated I can install whatever software I want on them. I chose to install OpenVPN as the server side software. Very little shared hosting accounts will permit you to install daemon software, so if you're on a shared account, you probably can't do a true VPN to it.
However if you just have a server with SSH access, you can do the -D thing to it, and you won't even need anything else installed on that server, it having ssh is enough (unless your host has specifically configured their SSH servers to not permit the -D option). Though you should be cautious because it might be a violation of the terms of your hosting agreement, so it might get your account shut down if they discover you doing it and are not happy with it. With my dedicated boxes its a non-issue, they don't care what I do with it as long as it's legal.
There's a variety of free VPN software for Linux. I used OpenVPN because it's easy to set up on Debian (which one of my servers runs). I then run the OpenVPN software locally.
An even easier solution that requires nothing unusual running on your server is to just use the -D option on ssh. For example: ssh -D 1080 user@host.com (from your home computer)
What this does is set up "dynamic routing" (aka a socks server) listening on the localhost address of your home computer. Set up any programs you want to tunnel through this to use a socks proxy of localhost port 1080 (the port number is specified immediately after the -D flag to ssh). If you run Linux, investigate tsocks, it can be used to automatically "socksify" individual programs or the entire operating system (by inserting it into the ld_preload, though be careful with this option as if you do it wrong you may cripple your os and need to boot on a restore cd to remove the ld_preload option), even for programs which do not support socks proxies by default.
Absolutely, this is a major player in this market, with a lot of buying power and therefore a lot of weight to throw around. It would just be incredibly costly now for AMD to not improve the quality of their Linux drivers!
Phone companies like Verizon actually go out of their way to remove features of phones in order to charge you for services that the phone would provide by default. For example my camera phone had its bluetooth file transfer (OBEX which it comes with by default) disabled so they could charge me air time and a transaction fee to email the picture to myself instead. They also disabled its ability to play MP3's as ring tones, and further block all inbound messages to it that have mp3's as attachments.
I smell an opportunity for someone to start selling a personal VPN service, where all your communications are encrypted, and carried across the backbone encrypted to a data center as close as possible (network topology wise) to the destination before being sent plain text across the last segment.
I've recently started using a full-time encrypted personal VPN to one of my boxes which is 1 hop (data center's router) from several backbones. I add direct (non-vpn) routing for services which are particularly latency sensitive (gaming).
I don't currently suspect my home ISP of doing this sort of deep analysis or otherwise interfering with my data stream, but in this way I also don't have to worry about it.
IMHO this sort of thing will become the standard if this trend of ISPs snooping and changing our data continues.
Slashdot Mirror
Aah, love to hate the poor.
You're probably right, everyone at or below the poverty level deserves to be there. So it's not useful to feel sorry for them or try to help them get out of the situation.
I'm not arguing that no one is like this, but I'm arguing that there are probably a lot more than you realize. Unfortunately the people that get noticed are the people who abuse the situation, and as a result they make it harder for the other people who are in that situation through misfortune or who only have the natural talents to land a minimum wage job (which is substantially below the poverty level).
Watch In Pursuit of Happyness. Although everything turns out ok in the end, it's not a feel-good movie, and that was not its point. The point of the movie is to show how it is that you can try your absolute hardest and still fail through misfortune and bad decisions (which were only identifiable as bad in hind sight). If there weren't programs to help this guy get out of the situation he was in, he would not have been able to, as it was he had to risk everything he had, small as it was, on a long shot, and he got lucky. This is a true story.
Update: I checked this out on my desktop, and there *was* a filter in Adblock to block this specifically. I had actually just installed Adblock on the machine I'm writing from about 20 minutes before finding this story - it's a new machine. It didn't have the filter. But my desktop which has been around for a while, did have that "adblock slander" entry in its list. Figuring my laptop probably was a more recent filter set what with being only at most 20 minutes old, I updated the filter on my desktop, and lo and behold the page appeared.
So I guess the guy who maintains at least EasyList USA added it as a slander entry, then took it back out some time earlier today.
However it does also look like their server is up and down a lot, I'm getting a number of refused connections and having to make each attempt multiple times. Go Slashdot.
dang, I should have proofed this, there's a big chunk in the middle missing because I did "for (x = 0; x < node.attributes.length..." and forgot to escape the <. Silly me for wanting to get it out before going to work.
Adblock only blocks what it's told to block. You may subscribe to filters and those filters may include patterns which block this site, but you can see the list if you like, just click on Adblock options. Mine doesn't seem to have any filters that target this site, and it doesn't load for me. Maybe a slashdotting, maybe adblock is blocking it. I don't care enough to switch browsers to find out.
You'd better have something that I actively want in order to convince me I should go out of my way to accommodate you, and I'd better be convinced of that before I visit your site. If you have something I want that badly, chances are good it's something I want to buy that only you sell, in which case you are turning away business if you fail to convince me to go out of my way for you; and you're doing this in order to serve ads at me; hence instead of being happy enough with my sale, you want to eek out 0.1% additional by serving me ads, and for this you're turning away a large portion of a market share that is between 10-25% depending on your industry.
If the only thing you have to offer me are words, then I guarantee that I don't want to read it enough to make me fire up a different browser just for you, there is no word-smithing site today that I wouldn't stop visiting if it did something as annoying as this, in fact most would lose me for doing anything even less annoying.
Flex isn't forcibly strongly typed, but it gives you the option of operating that way if you like. You can declare types on all your function returns, parameters, and local variables, and any variable you do declare a type for it will be enforced upon, and the IDE will also give you object insight (typing the variable name and a dot will give you a dropdown of the properties and methods, attaching to an event on this object will give you a dropdown of the events on the object).
.NET which aren't supported cross-platform, and x-plat Silverlight releases supporting it will lag far behind to the point of eventually just being a stale static project.
Flex's IDE is an Eclipse plugin, and Flex is a compiled language. It is able to take advantage of Eclipse's refactoring tools, and it has an integrated debugger which allows you to set break points, pause execution, examine the stack and values of variables at run time. It has a robust exception system, and it never just 'stops' unless you have compiled it without the debugging information (which is what you would typically do only for a production compilation in order to reduce size and make it less likely that someone will tinker with the inner workings of your application - the same as compiling without symbols for other languages).
My comment about IE is not to suggest that the IE team sucks, therefore the Silverlight team will suck. Instead it's my observation that the browser market was heating up, and Microsoft saw this as a threat to their desktop ubiquity. They realized that if all the important things people do are web-based instead of desktop software, then the browser IS the operating system. They needed to make sure they were the dominant player in this arena so that it wouldn't be possible for people to swap out their OS. As soon as they achieved market dominance on the browser, they stopped working on it. Because they laid dormant for so long, another major player crept in and started to challenge them again. This then is the only thing that prompted them to fire up the forge of development again, and they produced a very very minor upgrade which focused almost exclusively on the user interface. People want tabs, people got tabs, this is what will keep PEOPLE on the browser, they don't care if you can do "for (var x = 0; x if there's some deal breaking application which is Windows only.
They also know that since Flex is cross platform, they can't get away with offering such a superficially inferior product (in that anyone can point directly at it and observe it as a deficiency with Silverlight, not to say that cross-platform isn't important), so they must develop it cross platform. They've managed to convince the Mono guys that they should donate their time to Microsoft to support this.
If Microsoft succeeds in this arena, development will peter off once they achieve dominance since they don't want to be in this arena, they just have to be, and as a result they will have lost all motivation to proceed forward with development on it. They'll end up making some releases to
I think that competition is healthy in all markets, but Microsoft is not a competitor for the people, they are a competitor for their desktop. Flex is an indirect but very significant competitor to the desktop. The desktop is not a competitor to flex though, so this competition is one-way, and Microsoft needed to enter the arena only to be able to take up the challenge which would otherwise be another substantial chink in the desktop market share armor. Each chink makes more and more developers realize that they need to not just assume Microsoft, and they need to accommodate other platforms. So each chink cracks and spreads. A chink in the armor here and there and suddenly there's enough x-plat momentum that Microsoft loses their bread and butter - the OS.
(sorry for any typos or unusually formed sentences, I'm sending this before heading off to work, and don't have time to proof it)
Actually the spit-and-duct-tape thing is not quite right. They built a rich language (Actionscript is very java-esque) and then out of that grew user controls. I find it laudible that their user controls are written in Flash & Actionscript, because it means that the language is mature enough to support advancing itself without having to update the player to get better controls. You can get access to the full source for their user controls, and you can extend those user controls (naturally via the extends keyword) to create your own custom controls.
They built these controls slowly over time, and as the language got more advanced, so did the controls.
I haven't seen silverlight's inner workings, but based on Microsoft's track record for such things, I'm going to guess that their controls are at least partially native (did Microsoft ever fix the fact that <select> boxes render on a different canvas than the page, so you can't put divs that completely or partially cover them?), and the result will be less overall flexibility since if this is the case, even Microsoft won't have found their own platform sufficient to their needs, and needed to cheat to get it done.
I don't know, I think that you could subtly change the color or darkness of text or its background to indicate how recently it has been modified. Either as a gradient where black is 2+ weeks old, and dark blue is 1 day old, or else simply highlight any text which had been recently modified, particularly if a certain article or paragraph has had a lot of activity recently relative to the amount of activity on that article (indicating an edit war).
A lot of people say, "I'm ok with it if it reduces the price of the game," but I haven't heard a single game company offering this as a motivation. No one has said, "Our development costs are rising, so to offset the load of this on the consumer, we're going to start offering a version of the game with advertising that costs less." No, all of the game developer community discussion has been surrounding whether or not gamers would accept the advertising. This is only a supplemental revenue stream which will degrade gaming experience without offering anything back to us, the gamers.
I think they under-estimate the willpower of the up and coming generation to avoid advertising though. It won't be long at all until someone has an adblock-style product for gaming. Perhaps it locks games processes down to certain ports (only the ports necessary for online play). If they deliver advertising over those ports, then expect it to modify the process memory at run-time to purge advertisements. Now that is a service I would pay for.
I think they'd probably alienate their existing advertisers and lose that income, but it would take a while before the people interested in such content started purchasing the paper, and even longer before advertisers interested in running adverts in their newly formatted publication were convinced that it would be of much value.
Actually probably a better approach would be if newspapers started having a real tech section (and not just a "here are the latest gadgets" which some papers are doing now), maybe starting as part of the Sunday paper, and expanding to weekdays as interest builds.
I think most people misunderstand defcon, including a lot of its attendees. The purpose is not to be l33t crackers as much as it is to know more than the would-be crackers so you can protect yourself from them, sort of a beating-them-at-their-own-game thing. Defcon is a security conference, not an insecurity conference.
So an under cover anybody, be they reporter or FBI, or whatever, is completely contrary to the point of the conference, and of any conference, this one is the one where you would want to out such people, it only reinforces the point of it all.
Automatix is a good attempt, and I'm sure for some users it's a real godsend, but for me it royally screwed some things up. I'll admit I'm not your average user, I have been known to go download newer .deb's of files from the web and the like (a few very active projects the distro just can't keep up with, and I love active projects). For example, I couldn't figure out for the longest time why one of my drivers would just never load unless I manually loaded it. It turns out that it had been blacklisted. Not in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, but in some other /etc file (whose name I now forget, but doesn't contain the word "blacklist"). Each time I rebooted, the driver file was physically missing from the disk, and I had to uninstall and reinstall linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r` in order to get the file back (even an apt-get install --reinstall wasn't sufficient, had to be apt-get remove, apt-get install).
/", causing me to discover that file in /etc which said something like:
/home on its own partition! Makes it very easy to do a fresh install and keep everything important!)
After MUCH unsuccessful googling, I decided to see if there was some script which was doing this to me, and I "grep -R drivername
# drivername automatically blacklisted by automatix
blacklist=drivername
There were a couple of other weird things, and that box just never quite got right again until I reinstalled from scratch (which is why you want to have
It's the unfortunate consequence of programs that try to do too much thinking for you, but which are attached on after the fact.
I think it'd be great if a distribution could present all of the standard legal disclaimers as a list during the install process so that you can one-click OK them all and the system could just start at a standard state. It would be fantastic if you could just have a fully functional system after the install is complete so that you can pass it off to your grandmother ready to go. Those scary legal disclaimers after the fact are confusing and look like errors to people who don't know much about technology.
That's an interesting chart. Here is another interesting chart comparing Microsoft vs Ubuntu. I don't want to read too much into it, but there is a decided decline in Microsoft which is inverse to the rise of Ubuntu.
Not to detract from your point, but our guild had a lot of fun taking level 70's into old world dungeons to help them with lock and pally mount quests. Frankly you really only need one well-geared level 70, or two normally geared level 70s to solo old world dungeons. Also this turns out to be pretty good experience for the level 60.
We ran MantisBT on a Windows 2003 server at my previous job. Added 30 or so extra lines to the config file which took the user's NT logon (automatically authenticated with WIA in IIS), looked them up in the user table, if they weren't present, did an LDAP call to find out who they are and add them to the database automatically, and finally set up the session to make them logged in. It made it seamless (though new users would have to visit the site once to get their account created in order to be added to any projects).
ntfs-3g is pretty nice; for a while I was using it to read and write my Windows partition from Linux (so that it could be my shared disk space) but I'll caution you that it is low on performance. I played games under Transgaming's Cedega from my Ubuntu install, and found very little need to ever reboot into Windows. But I wanted to keep my game data on the Windows disk in case a game ever needed a patch or something that Cedega wasn't able to complete. So I ran the games right off the Windows partition.
I digress, long story short, I discovered that I got a significant performance increase in my gaming when I copied my game data over to ext3. For example, Warcraft off ntfs-3g took between 15 and 20 seconds to make it to the login screen (with a cpu being pegged the whole time). On ext3 it's about 2-3 seconds, and the CPU is actually pretty quiet before it enters full screen.
You need a box where you have the appropriate permissions. For myself, I have several dedicated servers hosted at ThePlanet in Texas. Because they're dedicated I can install whatever software I want on them. I chose to install OpenVPN as the server side software. Very little shared hosting accounts will permit you to install daemon software, so if you're on a shared account, you probably can't do a true VPN to it.
However if you just have a server with SSH access, you can do the -D thing to it, and you won't even need anything else installed on that server, it having ssh is enough (unless your host has specifically configured their SSH servers to not permit the -D option). Though you should be cautious because it might be a violation of the terms of your hosting agreement, so it might get your account shut down if they discover you doing it and are not happy with it. With my dedicated boxes its a non-issue, they don't care what I do with it as long as it's legal.
There's a variety of free VPN software for Linux. I used OpenVPN because it's easy to set up on Debian (which one of my servers runs). I then run the OpenVPN software locally.
An even easier solution that requires nothing unusual running on your server is to just use the -D option on ssh. For example:
ssh -D 1080 user@host.com (from your home computer)
What this does is set up "dynamic routing" (aka a socks server) listening on the localhost address of your home computer. Set up any programs you want to tunnel through this to use a socks proxy of localhost port 1080 (the port number is specified immediately after the -D flag to ssh). If you run Linux, investigate tsocks, it can be used to automatically "socksify" individual programs or the entire operating system (by inserting it into the ld_preload, though be careful with this option as if you do it wrong you may cripple your os and need to boot on a restore cd to remove the ld_preload option), even for programs which do not support socks proxies by default.
Absolutely, this is a major player in this market, with a lot of buying power and therefore a lot of weight to throw around. It would just be incredibly costly now for AMD to not improve the quality of their Linux drivers!
Phone companies like Verizon actually go out of their way to remove features of phones in order to charge you for services that the phone would provide by default. For example my camera phone had its bluetooth file transfer (OBEX which it comes with by default) disabled so they could charge me air time and a transaction fee to email the picture to myself instead. They also disabled its ability to play MP3's as ring tones, and further block all inbound messages to it that have mp3's as attachments.
I smell an opportunity for someone to start selling a personal VPN service, where all your communications are encrypted, and carried across the backbone encrypted to a data center as close as possible (network topology wise) to the destination before being sent plain text across the last segment.
So close to 20 million!
Only Gmail's login process is https, once you get to the mail page it's standard http. However you can change the URL to https and it seems to stick.
If you use their pop/smtp access, that access is fully encrypted.
I've recently started using a full-time encrypted personal VPN to one of my boxes which is 1 hop (data center's router) from several backbones. I add direct (non-vpn) routing for services which are particularly latency sensitive (gaming).
I don't currently suspect my home ISP of doing this sort of deep analysis or otherwise interfering with my data stream, but in this way I also don't have to worry about it.
IMHO this sort of thing will become the standard if this trend of ISPs snooping and changing our data continues.
Feel free to post a link to this article and your revisions, and we'll corroborate your sources and repair the article.