Some people prefer more recent software. On my laptop, I'm looking forward to OpenOffice 3.0, some upgrades to Tomboy, Pidgin, (tentatively) Amarok, and several other packages I use. The Open Source world moves quickly with most software, and running something that's close to two years old may mean you're missing a lot of features.
Certainly, there are systems you'd rather keep up and running in a known-good configuration than try new software that may or may not work as well. I have a MythTV backend / web and file server that I try to keep up as much as possible. It was on Dapper from the day it came out until I rebuilt the box and decided that since Gutsy and Dapper had about the same end-of-life, I'd use the more recent of the two. It stayed on Gutsy for about 14 months before being upgraded to Hardy, where it will stay until Hardy's support winds down.
I understand why you'd want to stay with one release for a long time, but the non-LTS releases exist for a reason, and it makes sense that people would want things like apt-p2p to help the upgrade go smoothly.
That's pretty much what I came here to say. The CO2 released when making alcohol was in the air just a few years earlier, before the plants in the ingredients had used it for growth. If we hadn't made alcohol from it, the plants would have decomposed and released most of that CO2 back into the air anyway.
As others have pointed out, the CO2 from fossil fuels that go into growing and harvesting the crops may be noteworthy, but the CO2 released by the yeast is a non-issue.
Every time I came across this, I would check the HTML source to be sure the "action" attribute pointed at https (or could that still bite me somehow?).
According to Moxie Marlinspike, (creator of SSLStrip), some browsers will re-download the page when you click view source. It would be plausible to convert https to http for the first request only, so if the user requests the source for checking the submission form, it would say https when they checked it.
The problem is that a MITM can modify that 301 redirect from https://secure.example.com/ to http://secure.example.com/ Since they're in the middle of the transaction, they capture your packets and encrypt them before forwarding them on to https://secure.example.com./ The only indicator that something is amiss is the lack of an 's' in the protocol, which lots of people won't notice.
Alternatively, he might redirect from https://secure.example.com/ to https://secure.example.com/.ijj.cn, except that the slashes and dots in the last example are unicode characters that look like slashes and dots, so they don't register with the browser in the same way. He gets a legit cert to *.ijj.cn, then logs everything and forwards your responses to the address before.ijj.cn. For long URLS (which many secure logins have), the trailing.ijj.cn ends up past the end of your URL bar, and you don't notice.
After seeing Moxie's presentation, I'll be double checking every URL that needs to be secure to verify the 'https' protocol, and doesn't have any unusual endings. For things like the bank, I'll probably just bookmark the https version and never request the http version.
I used to have a laptop that was set up so that I could boot Windows, or load the same Windows installation in a VM.
That laptop wasn't really capable of good virtualization, but if you need both Windows and Linux, I'd say that's the way to go. If you need to access some lightweight program, pull it up in a VM. If you need dedicated resources (or dependable graphics acceleration), reboot. Configuring hardware profiles can be a bit of a pain, but if we're talking about selling computers with this out of the box, why not?
When TrueCrypt released version 5.0, they lacked a 64 bit version. Myself and a couple of others on the Ubuntu forums hacked at the source until we got a 64 bit version to compile and run smoothly. It may not be an OSI approved license, but the source is definitely there for those who want to pick at it.
Personally I use a program called rdiff-backup. I backup my laptop to my desktop, and I back up my desktop to a different drive on my desktop. My father and I are (slowly) setting up a system where I'll back up to his computer in Missouri, while he backs up to my computer in Oklahoma. We do the initial backup with removable storage, and the rest across the internet.
Rdiff-backup is bandwidth efficient, and saves data so you can reconstruct old copies of files from the current copy. You can keep data for as long as you have space, and delete files older than a specified time.
I don't know if Alltell will let you do this, but I use Grand Central for voice mail. The intent of Grand Central is that you have one phone number that rings multiple other phone numbers. But they also have a great voice mail service. I registered an account (free), set a quick rule to go straight to voice mail.
My phone let me specify a number for forwarding calls when I'm unavailable. I switched it from T-Mobile's voice mail number to my Grand Central number.
Now I can get text messages when someone leaves a voicemail (more reliable than T-Mobile's notification). I can also check my voicemail on the computer, and save them permanently if I so desire.
I made the comment based on my (admittedly limited) personal experience. My iPod is my main music player, but my (relatively cheap) phone plays AAC, and the mp3 player my mom paid $50 for (on sale) plays AAC. I have friends with Zunes, and they can play AAC. I haven't been searching for a player, but it's been a while since I've seen one that didn't play AAC files. I assumed this was a common trend, but perhaps I was incorrect.
In any case, the point of my comment still stands. Converting from one lossy format to another introduces noticeable artifacts. If you have an AAC file, leave it as AAC where you can, and convert it to mp3 only for devices that can't play AAC.
Take it one step further and overwrite the headers for your encrypted partition. Then nobody can compel you to produce the key.
I use LUKS, which uses anti-forensic techniques for storing a copy of the key (encrypted with the user's password) in a header. The header is about 1 kb (see payload offset in cryptsetup luksDump). Finish with a drive, write random data over the first kilobyte of it, and if you trust 256 bit AES, your data is gone.
Ripping from an original source to a lossy format is noticeable only to the most trained ears. Converting from one lossy format to another starts producing artifacts that the average user can hear on run of the mill equipment.
AAC will play on most portable devices these days. If you have something specific you want to play it on that can't handle an AAC, I'd make an mp3 copy just for that device, and keep the higher quality version for your computer and other devices.
That was my thought. The only time any of my cards are out of their devices is when I'm transferring the data to my hard-drive. I pop it out of my camera, phone, vibrator (????), etc., put it in my laptop, copy the data off, and put it back. No problem.
I suppose if you're on a long trip and taking a lot of pictures with a camera that doesn't support SDHC (limiting you to 2GB), you might need to swap out cards throughout the trip, but keep them in your camera case and problem solved.
From that respect, I can't see it being any worse than having everyone go through screening. If everyone is screened, the default assumption is that a person's intentions are benign. If only people flagged as malicious go through secondary screening, the default assumption is still going to be that the person's intentions are benign, but that assumption will carry a lower weight.
You'd still need a copy of Windows. It would go a long way to replacing the dual boot, but Wine will still have its place. That said, I'm sure this is better than software rendering, but I have my doubts to the usability of 3D graphics in VirtualBox.
My big concern is that they won't care if that Z bytes are RIAA music or Z bytes of Ubuntu, they'll just cut off your connection for sharing Z bytes.
I'm not a pirate. If they could come up with a perfect method for blocking illegal file sharing while allowing legal file sharing, that would have very little impact on me. My big concern is that I'll get cut off for appearing to pirate, when my uses are perfectly legit.
Not only that, there probably aren't cost savings to turning off a user's work computer.
Assuming the high end figure - $75 / year for turning off computers at night - you save about $0.30 per night by turning off the computer. If it takes 3 minutes to reboot and bring up the applications you were using the day before, then that's 5% of an hour that employee doesn't spend working. If they're making minimum wage -- $6.55 / hr -- then the employer just paid the employee $0.32, counteracting the power savings and then some.
Most people who do their jobs on a computer are probably making more than minimum wage, but the point is that it's not cost effective for the lowest end employees. If you've got an engineer making $80/hr, you just lost a net of $3.70 by turning off the computer.
Now, if people have other productive things to do while the computer boots up, it might still be worthwhile, but impatience for boot times indicates that they do not. This might still have a positive environmental impact, but it's probably not going to be a significant power saving.
What if it's found that Dell (or some other OEM) is helping to foot the legal bill (because they have something to gain from a particular outcome), but had nothing to do with the initial violations?
NASA showed results for its money decades ago, but has been a waste for years.
In the early years, NASA was spectacular. Getting from Earth to the moon in under a decade is no small feat. The results have been drastic improvements in computers, medicines, and numerous other technologies.
Since landing on the moon, what has NASA done? They've put some satellites into space, put some landers on Mars, killed 14 astronauts, and that's about it. There have been private companies that have tried to put satellites into space, but many of them have failed after NASA used tax dollars to under-cut them.
The landers on Mars are interesting, but I haven't seen much tangible value arise from that exploration, nor am I aware of any expected value in any established time frame. Perhaps it can be continued in the future, but when we're talking about keeping the nation's head above water, mars rovers are one of the easier things to cut.
My hope for the future of space exploration comes from the private sector. I hope that the Obama administration will reduce the size of NASA, but help to encourage continued innovation from the private sector.
Anyone tried it on Moonlight? I've tried a few other Silverlight applications on Moonlight with varying degrees of success. I might consider restarting my Netflix subscription if Moonlight could play the "Watch Instantly" features.
I suspect that you'll get something like GMT from the radio transmissions, and the clock itself adds however many hours it needs to get to the present time zone and to consider daylight savings time.
For all the components you get with a Mac, they're fairly priced. I still contend that they're over priced because I don't need all the components you get with the most basic Mac. If I want to get a Mac, I have to pay more than I'd have to pay for a PC that met my needs.
As others have pointed out, comparing a DVD drive to a BluRay player is a bit inaccurate, but in general you're right.
People have DVD players everywhere. Every computer these days has a DVD drive. People have DVD palyers hooked up to the 15" TV in their kitchen. Minivans will often have built in DVD players with tiny screens so kids can watch movies on long trips.
People are used to being able to play movies everywhere, and that's not going to change. Since BluRay discs are bound to BluRay players, if people want to play BluRay discs everywhere they currently like to play movies, they're going to have to buy BluRay players for their computers, for that 15" TV in their kitchen, and for that tiny little screen in their mini-van. I don't think there are many people who care enough about having HD content on the one screen in media center to forgo playing their media everywhere else, or to justify $200 a player for every other screen they own.
Eventually prices will drop low enough that people could put BluRay players everywhere, but we're already seeing online digital distribution systems that deliver HD content, and there are a variety of ways to deliver this content straight to your television. The demand for HD in the home theater will be met by systems that offer instant gratification, rather than having to drive to the video store and buy or rent a BluRay disc (or worse, wait for it to come in the mail). Screens that can't have broadband available generally don't benefit from HD content, so less expensive DVDs will continue to meet demands.
I'm not saying BluRay is going to disappear, but I really don't think it will ever displace DVDs.
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Certainly, there are systems you'd rather keep up and running in a known-good configuration than try new software that may or may not work as well. I have a MythTV backend / web and file server that I try to keep up as much as possible. It was on Dapper from the day it came out until I rebuilt the box and decided that since Gutsy and Dapper had about the same end-of-life, I'd use the more recent of the two. It stayed on Gutsy for about 14 months before being upgraded to Hardy, where it will stay until Hardy's support winds down.
I understand why you'd want to stay with one release for a long time, but the non-LTS releases exist for a reason, and it makes sense that people would want things like apt-p2p to help the upgrade go smoothly.
As others have pointed out, the CO2 from fossil fuels that go into growing and harvesting the crops may be noteworthy, but the CO2 released by the yeast is a non-issue.
According to Moxie Marlinspike, (creator of SSLStrip), some browsers will re-download the page when you click view source. It would be plausible to convert https to http for the first request only, so if the user requests the source for checking the submission form, it would say https when they checked it.
Alternatively, he might redirect from https://secure.example.com/ to https://secure.example.com/.ijj.cn, except that the slashes and dots in the last example are unicode characters that look like slashes and dots, so they don't register with the browser in the same way. He gets a legit cert to *.ijj.cn, then logs everything and forwards your responses to the address before .ijj.cn. For long URLS (which many secure logins have), the trailing .ijj.cn ends up past the end of your URL bar, and you don't notice.
After seeing Moxie's presentation, I'll be double checking every URL that needs to be secure to verify the 'https' protocol, and doesn't have any unusual endings. For things like the bank, I'll probably just bookmark the https version and never request the http version.
That laptop wasn't really capable of good virtualization, but if you need both Windows and Linux, I'd say that's the way to go. If you need to access some lightweight program, pull it up in a VM. If you need dedicated resources (or dependable graphics acceleration), reboot. Configuring hardware profiles can be a bit of a pain, but if we're talking about selling computers with this out of the box, why not?
Am I the only one who saw this and expected an article about how people aren't trading in their computers as often?
When TrueCrypt released version 5.0, they lacked a 64 bit version. Myself and a couple of others on the Ubuntu forums hacked at the source until we got a 64 bit version to compile and run smoothly. It may not be an OSI approved license, but the source is definitely there for those who want to pick at it.
Rdiff-backup is bandwidth efficient, and saves data so you can reconstruct old copies of files from the current copy. You can keep data for as long as you have space, and delete files older than a specified time.
My phone let me specify a number for forwarding calls when I'm unavailable. I switched it from T-Mobile's voice mail number to my Grand Central number.
Now I can get text messages when someone leaves a voicemail (more reliable than T-Mobile's notification). I can also check my voicemail on the computer, and save them permanently if I so desire.
In any case, the point of my comment still stands. Converting from one lossy format to another introduces noticeable artifacts. If you have an AAC file, leave it as AAC where you can, and convert it to mp3 only for devices that can't play AAC.
I use LUKS, which uses anti-forensic techniques for storing a copy of the key (encrypted with the user's password) in a header. The header is about 1 kb (see payload offset in cryptsetup luksDump). Finish with a drive, write random data over the first kilobyte of it, and if you trust 256 bit AES, your data is gone.
AAC will play on most portable devices these days. If you have something specific you want to play it on that can't handle an AAC, I'd make an mp3 copy just for that device, and keep the higher quality version for your computer and other devices.
I suppose if you're on a long trip and taking a lot of pictures with a camera that doesn't support SDHC (limiting you to 2GB), you might need to swap out cards throughout the trip, but keep them in your camera case and problem solved.
From that respect, I can't see it being any worse than having everyone go through screening. If everyone is screened, the default assumption is that a person's intentions are benign. If only people flagged as malicious go through secondary screening, the default assumption is still going to be that the person's intentions are benign, but that assumption will carry a lower weight.
You'd still need a copy of Windows. It would go a long way to replacing the dual boot, but Wine will still have its place. That said, I'm sure this is better than software rendering, but I have my doubts to the usability of 3D graphics in VirtualBox.
I'm not a pirate. If they could come up with a perfect method for blocking illegal file sharing while allowing legal file sharing, that would have very little impact on me. My big concern is that I'll get cut off for appearing to pirate, when my uses are perfectly legit.
Assuming the high end figure - $75 / year for turning off computers at night - you save about $0.30 per night by turning off the computer. If it takes 3 minutes to reboot and bring up the applications you were using the day before, then that's 5% of an hour that employee doesn't spend working. If they're making minimum wage -- $6.55 / hr -- then the employer just paid the employee $0.32, counteracting the power savings and then some.
Most people who do their jobs on a computer are probably making more than minimum wage, but the point is that it's not cost effective for the lowest end employees. If you've got an engineer making $80/hr, you just lost a net of $3.70 by turning off the computer.
Now, if people have other productive things to do while the computer boots up, it might still be worthwhile, but impatience for boot times indicates that they do not. This might still have a positive environmental impact, but it's probably not going to be a significant power saving.
What if it's found that Dell (or some other OEM) is helping to foot the legal bill (because they have something to gain from a particular outcome), but had nothing to do with the initial violations?
Resizable, to me, implies growable and shrinkable. XFS is not shrinkable, unless you know something I don't.
In the early years, NASA was spectacular. Getting from Earth to the moon in under a decade is no small feat. The results have been drastic improvements in computers, medicines, and numerous other technologies.
Since landing on the moon, what has NASA done? They've put some satellites into space, put some landers on Mars, killed 14 astronauts, and that's about it. There have been private companies that have tried to put satellites into space, but many of them have failed after NASA used tax dollars to under-cut them.
The landers on Mars are interesting, but I haven't seen much tangible value arise from that exploration, nor am I aware of any expected value in any established time frame. Perhaps it can be continued in the future, but when we're talking about keeping the nation's head above water, mars rovers are one of the easier things to cut.
My hope for the future of space exploration comes from the private sector. I hope that the Obama administration will reduce the size of NASA, but help to encourage continued innovation from the private sector.
Anyone tried it on Moonlight? I've tried a few other Silverlight applications on Moonlight with varying degrees of success. I might consider restarting my Netflix subscription if Moonlight could play the "Watch Instantly" features.
I suspect that you'll get something like GMT from the radio transmissions, and the clock itself adds however many hours it needs to get to the present time zone and to consider daylight savings time.
For all the components you get with a Mac, they're fairly priced. I still contend that they're over priced because I don't need all the components you get with the most basic Mac. If I want to get a Mac, I have to pay more than I'd have to pay for a PC that met my needs.
And that's not even on sale. If you keep an eye out, you can get DVD players for ~$20.
People have DVD players everywhere. Every computer these days has a DVD drive. People have DVD palyers hooked up to the 15" TV in their kitchen. Minivans will often have built in DVD players with tiny screens so kids can watch movies on long trips.
People are used to being able to play movies everywhere, and that's not going to change. Since BluRay discs are bound to BluRay players, if people want to play BluRay discs everywhere they currently like to play movies, they're going to have to buy BluRay players for their computers, for that 15" TV in their kitchen, and for that tiny little screen in their mini-van. I don't think there are many people who care enough about having HD content on the one screen in media center to forgo playing their media everywhere else, or to justify $200 a player for every other screen they own.
Eventually prices will drop low enough that people could put BluRay players everywhere, but we're already seeing online digital distribution systems that deliver HD content, and there are a variety of ways to deliver this content straight to your television. The demand for HD in the home theater will be met by systems that offer instant gratification, rather than having to drive to the video store and buy or rent a BluRay disc (or worse, wait for it to come in the mail). Screens that can't have broadband available generally don't benefit from HD content, so less expensive DVDs will continue to meet demands.
I'm not saying BluRay is going to disappear, but I really don't think it will ever displace DVDs.