The detection part sounds interesting; coupled with remote kill-switches that some government agencies want, and ever deeper fly-by-wire technologies, it's sounds downright dystopian, though.
Jee, hyperbole much? Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that there will be any dystopian government interaction. That was your own shitty opinion piece. Its the same crap the article postulates:
The real question is: when the Swiss team's camera detects anger or disgust, what will it do? Notify the authorities? Apply the car's brakes? Switch the radio to soothing music? Tell knock-knock jokes? What's the appropriate response?
Stop it. Please. Those are some of the most idiotic question ever asked. The car wont do anything as this wont be installed in them. Why not? Simple: there are no answers for any of those silly questions that would avoid a legal minefield.
Examples: Driver is angry and car detects it. So the car notifies the authorities. - Authorities don't care enough about some butthurt driver to stop looking for speeders which make the county/city/town money. Besides after the 1000th notification of road rage in the first ten minutes of their highway patrol shift they will just turn the damn computer off.
Driver is angry and car detects it. So the car applies the brakes...... - Causing the driver to lose control or a rear end collision. Car manufacturer is sued into oblivion. Camera recalled.
Driver is angry and car detects it. So the car switches the radio to soothing music.... - Which distracts the driver causing an accident. Or the driver can blame a road rage accident on the sudden blast of Michael Bolton which startled them while enjoying a beautiful morning on the highway in bumper to bumper traffic. Car manufacturer is sued into oblivion. Camera recalled.
Not so serious but: Driver is angry and car detects it. So the car tells a knock knock joke.... Driver is offended by joke along with a concerned watchdog group. Public outrage ensues. Camera recalled.
What's the appropriate response? None. People will get angry. Its better to just let them scream or pound the steering wheel and let it out and then have a laugh. If it results in an accident and the drivers anger can be directly linked to the accident then let the courts decide the appropriate punishment.
"SUVs and pickup trucks are popular because people perceive that they are driving a tank and will fare better against the various pop-cans out there"
Only two kinds of people drive pickups: - Legit users who use them for actual hauling or towing (minority) - Manly men* who smoke cigars and wear sunglasses while crossing their arms with a scowl for every photo (like those cool dudes on american chopper). Bonus for adding: lift kits, truck nuts, bigger lift kits, rims, even bigger lift kits, monster truck tires, and chrome. An extra bonus if the pickup is diesel and the engine is modded to blow billowing clouds of black smoke for "coal rolls".
Same goes for SUV's but substitute "manly men" for self important asshole and add a third category: people who want the room if they need it in a pinch but rarely use it. Though they can somewhat fit into the legit users group.
*limited only to their reality bubble. For people outside the reality bubble, "douchebag pussy" is an applicable replacement term. Seriously, fuck those people.
I think that as we make more and more links between genes and how they affect the development of our body, we will find out they are crosslinked with other functions. Its like bug ridden code where fixing one bug causes another to pop up.
Our DNA codebase has been around for quite a long time. Perhaps it is as old as some of the first life to form on Earth. I would hazard a guess that it is ridden with "bugs" and debugging it will become a tricky operation. I also suspect that there are no magic genes that can turn things on or off with the flick of a switch without changing the state of another piece of genetic code.
Maybe we need to become more functional in order to reduce side effects:)
Air gapping is not a 100% fix. Its part wishful thinking and part buzz phrase which gets thrown around carelessly. If someone guarantees nothing will go wrong because of an air gap or one way serial connection then they are full of shit.
Think about it, how many computers have you ever come across that could function on a 100% "air gap"? What about updates or software fixes? You could write a control program and debug the hell out of it to ensure nothing will go wrong but eventually you know something will break and need fixing. And that fixing requires a PC that most likely has seen the internet.
Dont get me wrong, an air gap will reduce your attack surface. But many PAC's made today are running full blown operating systems. And Many of those run Windows XP embedded or Windows 7 embedded with real time subsystems (like TenAsys INtime or IntervalZero RTX). Then add to that the proliferation of ethernet and even wifi in industrial networks coupled with unsecured protocols and you have a nice time bomb. All you need is one infected USB key plugged into a Windows HMI to fix a small glitch or update a recipie and BAM, your air gapped network is now toast.
"said the person volunteering to get up at 3 am to go to the office to reset the a/c system."
That is not a realistic scenario. I know what you are saying but an a/c system isn't turned on at 3AM to begin with (unless you like wasting electricity). Most likely you will have these systems in a plant that runs 24/7 with 3 shifts and someone will know how to handle minor breakdowns and press a reset button if need be. A major breakdown can be solved in one of two ways: remotely or someone has to come on site. Guess which one is more convenient?
Case in point: I once designed a small automation system at work for laser welding hermetic connectors to a water meter housing. An employee was assigned to the job and I trained him to handle any problems. After the initial test run and some bug fixes in the first few weeks, there was no need to call me for problems. The only time after that initial break in period where I was needed was to replace a bad sensor. The idea is to make the system as idiot proof as possible.
I think you mean PLCC. It can be soldered directly to a board or socketed. And in the recent past it was the choice for socketing BIOS chips after DIP32 fell out of favor. QFP is quad flat pack which is always directly soldered to the board and not easily removed. I never seen a QFP socket outside of test fixtures.
With the high density of todays boards, even PLCC is gigantic in terms of footprint so many have moved to smaller SMT packages. I have seen Intel motherboards using 8 pin SOIC chips, most likely on an I2C or SPI bus. You can buy sockets for them but no mainstream motherboard maker sockets them.
OLPC was a project to get computers into the hands of children in developing nations. This was at a time when a laptop for a hundred bucks was thought to be impossible...... and then along came smart phones and tablets.
The OLPC was made obsolete by these devices. You can now get Android tablets for under 50 bucks and have access to hundreds of thousands of apps on the Android OS. No longer are you stuck in a sandbox like system with limited hardware and software. Sure they arent as rugged but the low cost makes them more appealing and they are essentially throw away (though that is not necessarily a good thing) See this: http://globalnews.ca/news/1203449/canadian-makers-of-worlds-lowest-cost-tablet-aim-for-a-20-device/
"But they are exactly as much of a deathtrap as they used to be. The CRX is one of the least-safe cars around, especially on the American road where it has to try to coexist with land yachts and land barges."
You think only SUV's and trucks are to blame for small, flimsy car deaths? Just about every modern vehicle is much more heavy and sturdy than the older flimsy Japanese cars. I had a friend who died in a crash in 2007 when some dick going upwards of 80 MPH ( on a side street with a 30MPH limit) in a late model Toyota hit him in the rear corner when he failed to cut around him. He was driving a 1989 Nissan Sentra which was pretty much tin foil with wheels. His car veered off the road, the front corner hit a pole which whipped the drivers side into a tree next to the pole. He died on impact while his girlfriend barely survived. She was in a wheelchair for about a year. The fucked up part? The car belonging to the kid who hit him was also totalled but he and his girlfriend walked away. The modern safety features of the Toyota saved them. The cops had told my friends parents that if he were in a more modern vehicle, he would have most likely survived. I even told him to get rid of that "flimsy death trap" not more than a month or two before. But he loved that car too much to part with it.
When you have that much data your only real viable option is to have a second storage array just as large. RAID 5/6 isn't backup. It provides fault tolerance which means you can still access (read/write) the array as you normally would if a disk fails.
Its almost a no-duh solution in lieu of tape or other cumbersome removeable storage options. Even backing up to 50GB or 100GB blu-ray discs would be rather pointless as the cost of a single disc is the cost of buying a movie on blu-ray. Even if you could fit 4+ movies on a 100GB BD-ROM is it worth the hassle and cost?
Why is another array better? Its quite simple. You dont have to shuffle discs or tapes to make backup sets. You also aren't stuck with a format that could become obsolete. That LTO tape drive might look good but what if it fails? Can you find another for a reasonable cost? Will you periodically test your backup tapes or disks for bit-rot? A tape or BD-ROM rotting in a safe deposit box, safe or shoe box under your bed is useless. If your disk fails you can replace them quite easily as most every disk supports SATA or SAS and controllers are found on every motherboard. A failure of a disk will be reported and you can handle it.
Here is another question that is kind of burning in my head. If your friend legally purchased all of his movies and music, wouldn't he have the original sources? If not, and i'm not judging I have a collection of both music and movies that I pilfered over the years, you have to be smart and make copies. My collection is just about 2TB, mostly some hard to come by movies and TV shows (entire MST3K library). My home server used to be on 24/7 but it was a waste of power. I almsot lost that array of 5 500GB disks until I made copies to 1TB drives. I now have a few 2TB drives that have copies of the server data on them. One drive is even at my place of work in a USB box. Even if my home burns down I still have a copy somewhere.
I'm writing a text editor, the one text editor to rule them all. It's called femto. Everything you type is so small you can't see it. When you save the file, its size so small you can't see it in the directory listing! Its going to change the way we edit.
This would not work. Not only are there liabilities if something goes wrong, but how does a chopper align a 140 foot pole over bolts with precision? The alignment process would be very difficult to achieve. And I doubt the government would want to accept responsibility if something goes wrong and there is loss of life, property damage or something else bad.
From the big bertha site they state the mast is bolted together in 20 foot sections so all you need is a crew, crane and a small flatbed truck. The expensive part is the crane which runs into the hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour. Its not a difficult job. Its just expensive.
Gnome 2 was perfect and is now thankfully continued by the MATE project. Before MATE, I used Xfce which felt like a lighter version of Gnome 2. I used to like KDE but its menu feels cluttered, even the latest KDE 4. Its the same mistake the Cinnamon team made.
Though, KDE does have a lot of interesting things like bindings for multiple languages such as PHP, C#, LUA, Ruby, Python etc. This open up application development to a wider audience.
"and why not go whole hog and even go petty thuggery and do some muggings?"
I laughed at the image I had in my head of a cartoon quad copter drone sporting a newsboy cap flying up to someone and a small robot arm extends out of the bottom revealing a larger-than-the-drone-club which is used to knock the victim unconscious.
Its funny how one of the shells is called "Columbine". The flower is known by two other names: Aquilegia and Granny's Bonnet. The former is the title of the Wikipedia article.
The drugs are probably smuggled in by gang members who are delivering to fellow members already behind bars. The pay is having someone on the inside to keep the gang alive and strong as drugs give them control inside the prison. This can help recruit new members as well as ensure snitches or rival gang members are dealt with in the can.
The original Xbox supported Direct3D 8.1 as its native API while the Xbox 360 supports a modified version of Direct3D 9.0c as its native API.
This could be useful for studios looking to port Xbox360 titles to the Steam Box platform. It makes sense as there are a lot of titles that could see a sort of resurrection on Steam and bring in some more money. It is also possibly the same D3D API subset used for Windows Phone 8.
OpenGL is pretty much used everywhere but Microsoft targeted games (Windows and Xbox). Using DirectX on Windows games allowed them to be portable between PC and the Xbox so more and more games went the D3D route to remain portable between the two.
I believe almost all CAD and 3D modelling software are OpenGL based. Android and iOS use OpenGL ES while any non Windows OS such as Linux and OSX use OpenGL for 3D graphics. With the big push to mobile and Microsoft left in the dust, OpenGL is the dominant player.
You have to stand up to a bully. The "don't sue us" mentality schools have developed have turned our kids into pussies and allowing bullies to roam freely.
Back in grade school I was on the bowling team and there was this one kid there who thought it was funny to make fun of me because I was Polish. Dumb pollok, polish jokes, talking down to me, etc. It was constant. One day I had enough and I punched that little dick right in his face knocking him over. He started to cry and my mother was there that day and she ran over as well as the kids father. So what does the kids father tell me? Why that he was going to have his older son beat me up (typical Howard Beach guido douche)! What a fantastic thing to tell a 10 year old. Well my mother EXPLODED on this dude. She made damn sure everyone heard what he said to me and that he was a coward and should be ashamed of himself and his sons shitty behaviour. The big coward then apologized and walked off with his son. After that I never heard a peep from that little brat.
Dont sit there and take it, they will never leave you alone. You always hear people say "violence isnt the answer". I will tell you this: some people only get the message after they get their clock cleaned. First use words, bite back at them. If that doesn't work then let them know, with your fist.
When I built a new PC a few years back I bought my old Vista PC to my mothers house and left it there. I had tons of stuff on it: video clips, pictures, music, and tons of software i installed over the years. But after moving to a fresh install of Win 7, I didnt miss even a small fraction of what was installed on my old PC. But me being me, a data rat packer, I couldn't give up or wipe the Vista install when I recently wanted to repurpose the old PC. So I uninstalled all of the games, shrank the Vista partition, did the registry hacks, uninstalled all of the hardware drivers and did a block level copy using Linux and VboxManage to a virtual disk image on another hard disk. I then moved that image to my desktop PC, created a VM in Virtualbox, pointed it to my image and it worked! So when I need my old desktop I simply open up Virtualbox and run my old PC image. Though I will admit the first few tries failed to boot. It wasn't until I read about the registry hack to change the disk controller to a generic intel controller did it finally work. Then I did the same to the XP PC's at the family business as I was confident in the procedure. I saved money by not having to buy new Windows licenses and had a full Linux install to work in if need be.
Most of my Linux tinkering is also done on a VM running on my Win 7 machine. Since I still game from time to time, running Windows as the primary OS makes sense. Dual booting is so 2000's. No one should be doing it unless they really need the GPU under Linux and need to run Windows natively.
Virtualization is amazing. I cant wait until desktop virtualization becomes mature enough so I don't have to install an OS directly on the hardware. I just want a small thumb drive to hold and boot the hypervisor or the hypervisor is part of the BIOS/EFI. Then run and install OS's from there while being able to give them direct access to hardware if necessary and sharing the GPU. No more hellish driver problems. I can move the image or hard disk to another PC and run the OS. If MS were smart they would make a downloadable Windows image that ran right out of the box, like vmware player. Would make a hell of an option for mobile users: unplug the disk from your PC, plug into laptop and hit the road. when you come home and need more horsepower you can plug back into the main PC.
They need to make Windows Free, maybe even open source (ok, that's a pipe dream)
They won't do that when they are making beaucoup dollars off of it.
Then they need to invent all kinds of stellar business apps that integrate with it flawlessly...and license those apps to businesses. Businesses will pay for supported apps, because they like to be covered if something happens (thats how oracle makes money)
Then they have software to support and develop for said apps: - SQL server - IIS - Visual Studio - etc....
Basically everything Microsoft is currently doing is wrong. They are digging their own grave and anyone with any tech savvy at all knows it.
Not everything they do is wrong. Windows server and active directory are pretty powerful and easy to manage. They have a huge chunk of small, medium and large IT shops under their influence. The Xbox, while not hugely profitable, is quite successful and they are one of the top two players along with Sony's PSx.
The only really wrong things they did were trying to get into the search engine game with Bing and their flawed mobile push. If they want Mobile they should have done two things: leave the Windows desktop alone and have a 3rd party make the hardware with Microsoft branded all over it like Google's Nexus line. Buying Nokia is a bad move, just have Nokia make a Microsoft exclusive and branded handset. And Metro on the desktop and server (seriously, WTF) has to die. There is no reason for its existence. If Metro on the desktop is so bloody important then let it run in a window side by side with classic applications (aka normal applications.) Make the crappy metro start menu an application that you launch from the start menu or pin it to the task bar. (sorry, had to do a metro rant)
I did the same for our PC's at the family business. We use Peachtree 2004, and have been using Peachtree since 1999 or so. Of course it won't run in Windows 7 nor will it run under Wine. I moved the XP install from the P4 hardware to a virtualbox VM with a few registry hacks to change the disk controller (the blight of moving windows installs). I then bought new AMD APUs, motherboards and gave each one a 1tb hard disk and 8gb ram (a little over $300 in parts). Installed Xubuntu 12.04, VirtualBox and automatically start the XP VM in full screen.
No re-installing anything so downtime was about a day so and I did it on a sunday. My mother can't tell the difference and XP runs *way* smoother. The benefit comes from the faster CPU, more memory and faster HDD (vs the old 5400RPM ATA disk) for the VM. I can also snapshot the VM or move it to a new PC without worrying about hardware changes. The beauty of a VM: hardware abstraction.
You only boot the system and start the software once a day so an SSD is overkill. I would skip the SSD as you really don't need it unless you have the money to spare or are loading large programs or files constantly. For basic desktop use 1TB is HUGE. I would rather more space for snapshots and other VM's if necessary. A 1TB WD Blue is about 55 bucks on newegg.
I've said it before and ill say it again: - ALIX board and case running m0n0wall - Ubiquiti UniFi AP - Decent switch (I like the metal box Netgear stuff, never had one fail on me yet. Currently I have a GS108T smart switch which lets me port mirror for packet sniffing devices, very handy)
Isolate the WLAN from your LAN. I only let ssh from the WLAN to the LAN. I only use the WLAN for my laptop, phone and tablet. Most of the things I do on those mobile devices are internet related so I don't need nor do I want both networks to be bridged. If I need LAN for my laptop I use a cable from my switch or ssh tunnel. I also disable the router's web configuration page for the WLAN.
Total cost is something like $250 - $300. Expensive to some but to me its totally worth it. I have never had to reboot the m0n0wall router since installing it about 4 or 5 years ago and the only time it was powered down was during hurricane sandy and the few times I needed to move things around so I unplugged it. Sure you could but a WRT54 and flash tomato or ddwrt but you are limited in terms of memory and you have only one LAN, the ALIX has three lan ports and mini PCI. I have only had the Ubiquiti AP for two months so I can't comment on its longevity but so far its been pretty damn solid. I had a WAP54g that started to crap out every day and needed to be rebooted plus its range was pathetic. From the attic to the first floor I had one bar of signal on my mobile devices. The Ubiquiti gives me full bars in the basement. The nice part is it is PoE so you just run an ethernet cable to it and a power injector at the router. You need to install this giant software package to manage and configure the thing but in the end it was worth it.
If you have a fast connection (100+mbps), the ALIX board might be underpowered and you will want to look at the Soekris net6501. Its costly but has four gigabit NIC's, mini PCIe, up to 2GB RAM and 1.6GHz Atom CPU and two PCIe x1 slots. I have been eyeing it for a while to run pfSense but I have no reason to replace the little rock solid ALIX/m0n0wall system.
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Jee, hyperbole much? Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that there will be any dystopian government interaction. That was your own shitty opinion piece. Its the same crap the article postulates:
Stop it. Please. Those are some of the most idiotic question ever asked. The car wont do anything as this wont be installed in them. Why not? Simple: there are no answers for any of those silly questions that would avoid a legal minefield.
Examples:
Driver is angry and car detects it. So the car notifies the authorities.
- Authorities don't care enough about some butthurt driver to stop looking for speeders which make the county/city/town money. Besides after the 1000th notification of road rage in the first ten minutes of their highway patrol shift they will just turn the damn computer off.
Driver is angry and car detects it. So the car applies the brakes......
- Causing the driver to lose control or a rear end collision. Car manufacturer is sued into oblivion. Camera recalled.
Driver is angry and car detects it. So the car switches the radio to soothing music....
- Which distracts the driver causing an accident. Or the driver can blame a road rage accident on the sudden blast of Michael Bolton which startled them while enjoying a beautiful morning on the highway in bumper to bumper traffic. Car manufacturer is sued into oblivion. Camera recalled.
Not so serious but:
Driver is angry and car detects it. So the car tells a knock knock joke....
Driver is offended by joke along with a concerned watchdog group. Public outrage ensues. Camera recalled.
What's the appropriate response?
None. People will get angry. Its better to just let them scream or pound the steering wheel and let it out and then have a laugh. If it results in an accident and the drivers anger can be directly linked to the accident then let the courts decide the appropriate punishment.
"SUVs and pickup trucks are popular because people perceive that they are driving a tank and will fare better against the various pop-cans out there"
Only two kinds of people drive pickups:
- Legit users who use them for actual hauling or towing (minority)
- Manly men* who smoke cigars and wear sunglasses while crossing their arms with a scowl for every photo (like those cool dudes on american chopper). Bonus for adding: lift kits, truck nuts, bigger lift kits, rims, even bigger lift kits, monster truck tires, and chrome. An extra bonus if the pickup is diesel and the engine is modded to blow billowing clouds of black smoke for "coal rolls".
Same goes for SUV's but substitute "manly men" for self important asshole and add a third category: people who want the room if they need it in a pinch but rarely use it. Though they can somewhat fit into the legit users group.
*limited only to their reality bubble. For people outside the reality bubble, "douchebag pussy" is an applicable replacement term. Seriously, fuck those people.
I think that as we make more and more links between genes and how they affect the development of our body, we will find out they are crosslinked with other functions. Its like bug ridden code where fixing one bug causes another to pop up.
Our DNA codebase has been around for quite a long time. Perhaps it is as old as some of the first life to form on Earth. I would hazard a guess that it is ridden with "bugs" and debugging it will become a tricky operation. I also suspect that there are no magic genes that can turn things on or off with the flick of a switch without changing the state of another piece of genetic code.
Maybe we need to become more functional in order to reduce side effects :)
Stuxnet proved that air gapping isn't enough.
Air gapping is not a 100% fix. Its part wishful thinking and part buzz phrase which gets thrown around carelessly. If someone guarantees nothing will go wrong because of an air gap or one way serial connection then they are full of shit.
Think about it, how many computers have you ever come across that could function on a 100% "air gap"? What about updates or software fixes? You could write a control program and debug the hell out of it to ensure nothing will go wrong but eventually you know something will break and need fixing. And that fixing requires a PC that most likely has seen the internet.
Dont get me wrong, an air gap will reduce your attack surface. But many PAC's made today are running full blown operating systems. And Many of those run Windows XP embedded or Windows 7 embedded with real time subsystems (like TenAsys INtime or IntervalZero RTX). Then add to that the proliferation of ethernet and even wifi in industrial networks coupled with unsecured protocols and you have a nice time bomb. All you need is one infected USB key plugged into a Windows HMI to fix a small glitch or update a recipie and BAM, your air gapped network is now toast.
"said the person volunteering to get up at 3 am to go to the office to reset the a/c system."
That is not a realistic scenario. I know what you are saying but an a/c system isn't turned on at 3AM to begin with (unless you like wasting electricity). Most likely you will have these systems in a plant that runs 24/7 with 3 shifts and someone will know how to handle minor breakdowns and press a reset button if need be. A major breakdown can be solved in one of two ways: remotely or someone has to come on site. Guess which one is more convenient?
Case in point: I once designed a small automation system at work for laser welding hermetic connectors to a water meter housing. An employee was assigned to the job and I trained him to handle any problems. After the initial test run and some bug fixes in the first few weeks, there was no need to call me for problems. The only time after that initial break in period where I was needed was to replace a bad sensor. The idea is to make the system as idiot proof as possible.
I think you mean PLCC. It can be soldered directly to a board or socketed. And in the recent past it was the choice for socketing BIOS chips after DIP32 fell out of favor. QFP is quad flat pack which is always directly soldered to the board and not easily removed. I never seen a QFP socket outside of test fixtures.
With the high density of todays boards, even PLCC is gigantic in terms of footprint so many have moved to smaller SMT packages. I have seen Intel motherboards using 8 pin SOIC chips, most likely on an I2C or SPI bus. You can buy sockets for them but no mainstream motherboard maker sockets them.
OLPC was a project to get computers into the hands of children in developing nations. This was at a time when a laptop for a hundred bucks was thought to be impossible...... and then along came smart phones and tablets.
The OLPC was made obsolete by these devices. You can now get Android tablets for under 50 bucks and have access to hundreds of thousands of apps on the Android OS. No longer are you stuck in a sandbox like system with limited hardware and software. Sure they arent as rugged but the low cost makes them more appealing and they are essentially throw away (though that is not necessarily a good thing)
See this:
http://globalnews.ca/news/1203449/canadian-makers-of-worlds-lowest-cost-tablet-aim-for-a-20-device/
You think only SUV's and trucks are to blame for small, flimsy car deaths? Just about every modern vehicle is much more heavy and sturdy than the older flimsy Japanese cars. I had a friend who died in a crash in 2007 when some dick going upwards of 80 MPH ( on a side street with a 30MPH limit) in a late model Toyota hit him in the rear corner when he failed to cut around him. He was driving a 1989 Nissan Sentra which was pretty much tin foil with wheels. His car veered off the road, the front corner hit a pole which whipped the drivers side into a tree next to the pole. He died on impact while his girlfriend barely survived. She was in a wheelchair for about a year. The fucked up part? The car belonging to the kid who hit him was also totalled but he and his girlfriend walked away. The modern safety features of the Toyota saved them. The cops had told my friends parents that if he were in a more modern vehicle, he would have most likely survived. I even told him to get rid of that "flimsy death trap" not more than a month or two before. But he loved that car too much to part with it.
When you have that much data your only real viable option is to have a second storage array just as large. RAID 5/6 isn't backup. It provides fault tolerance which means you can still access (read/write) the array as you normally would if a disk fails.
Its almost a no-duh solution in lieu of tape or other cumbersome removeable storage options. Even backing up to 50GB or 100GB blu-ray discs would be rather pointless as the cost of a single disc is the cost of buying a movie on blu-ray. Even if you could fit 4+ movies on a 100GB BD-ROM is it worth the hassle and cost?
Why is another array better? Its quite simple. You dont have to shuffle discs or tapes to make backup sets. You also aren't stuck with a format that could become obsolete. That LTO tape drive might look good but what if it fails? Can you find another for a reasonable cost? Will you periodically test your backup tapes or disks for bit-rot? A tape or BD-ROM rotting in a safe deposit box, safe or shoe box under your bed is useless. If your disk fails you can replace them quite easily as most every disk supports SATA or SAS and controllers are found on every motherboard. A failure of a disk will be reported and you can handle it.
Here is another question that is kind of burning in my head. If your friend legally purchased all of his movies and music, wouldn't he have the original sources? If not, and i'm not judging I have a collection of both music and movies that I pilfered over the years, you have to be smart and make copies. My collection is just about 2TB, mostly some hard to come by movies and TV shows (entire MST3K library). My home server used to be on 24/7 but it was a waste of power. I almsot lost that array of 5 500GB disks until I made copies to 1TB drives. I now have a few 2TB drives that have copies of the server data on them. One drive is even at my place of work in a USB box. Even if my home burns down I still have a copy somewhere.
Most jet fuel supplied to large municipal airports is piped in directly from refineries so the cost is much lower, about half of your $6. Source: http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_refoth_dcu_nus_m.htm
Small airports that cater to private planes, charter airlines and private jets have more expensive fuel as they have the fuel trucked in.
I'm writing a text editor, the one text editor to rule them all. It's called femto. Everything you type is so small you can't see it. When you save the file, its size so small you can't see it in the directory listing! Its going to change the way we edit.
Not offended, just amused. I was unaware of the flowers existence.
This would not work. Not only are there liabilities if something goes wrong, but how does a chopper align a 140 foot pole over bolts with precision? The alignment process would be very difficult to achieve. And I doubt the government would want to accept responsibility if something goes wrong and there is loss of life, property damage or something else bad.
From the big bertha site they state the mast is bolted together in 20 foot sections so all you need is a crew, crane and a small flatbed truck. The expensive part is the crane which runs into the hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour. Its not a difficult job. Its just expensive.
Gnome 2 was perfect and is now thankfully continued by the MATE project. Before MATE, I used Xfce which felt like a lighter version of Gnome 2. I used to like KDE but its menu feels cluttered, even the latest KDE 4. Its the same mistake the Cinnamon team made.
Though, KDE does have a lot of interesting things like bindings for multiple languages such as PHP, C#, LUA, Ruby, Python etc. This open up application development to a wider audience.
"and why not go whole hog and even go petty thuggery and do some muggings?"
I laughed at the image I had in my head of a cartoon quad copter drone sporting a newsboy cap flying up to someone and a small robot arm extends out of the bottom revealing a larger-than-the-drone-club which is used to knock the victim unconscious.
Its funny how one of the shells is called "Columbine". The flower is known by two other names: Aquilegia and Granny's Bonnet. The former is the title of the Wikipedia article.
The drugs are probably smuggled in by gang members who are delivering to fellow members already behind bars. The pay is having someone on the inside to keep the gang alive and strong as drugs give them control inside the prison. This can help recruit new members as well as ensure snitches or rival gang members are dealt with in the can.
Hold on, The subset of DX9.0c is probably the Xbox360 native API: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenGL_and_Direct3D#Gaming
This could be useful for studios looking to port Xbox360 titles to the Steam Box platform. It makes sense as there are a lot of titles that could see a sort of resurrection on Steam and bring in some more money. It is also possibly the same D3D API subset used for Windows Phone 8.
OpenGL is pretty much used everywhere but Microsoft targeted games (Windows and Xbox). Using DirectX on Windows games allowed them to be portable between PC and the Xbox so more and more games went the D3D route to remain portable between the two.
I believe almost all CAD and 3D modelling software are OpenGL based. Android and iOS use OpenGL ES while any non Windows OS such as Linux and OSX use OpenGL for 3D graphics. With the big push to mobile and Microsoft left in the dust, OpenGL is the dominant player.
At least its not a combination an idiot would use for their luggage.
You have to stand up to a bully. The "don't sue us" mentality schools have developed have turned our kids into pussies and allowing bullies to roam freely.
Back in grade school I was on the bowling team and there was this one kid there who thought it was funny to make fun of me because I was Polish. Dumb pollok, polish jokes, talking down to me, etc. It was constant. One day I had enough and I punched that little dick right in his face knocking him over. He started to cry and my mother was there that day and she ran over as well as the kids father. So what does the kids father tell me? Why that he was going to have his older son beat me up (typical Howard Beach guido douche)! What a fantastic thing to tell a 10 year old. Well my mother EXPLODED on this dude. She made damn sure everyone heard what he said to me and that he was a coward and should be ashamed of himself and his sons shitty behaviour. The big coward then apologized and walked off with his son. After that I never heard a peep from that little brat.
Dont sit there and take it, they will never leave you alone. You always hear people say "violence isnt the answer". I will tell you this: some people only get the message after they get their clock cleaned. First use words, bite back at them. If that doesn't work then let them know, with your fist.
When I built a new PC a few years back I bought my old Vista PC to my mothers house and left it there. I had tons of stuff on it: video clips, pictures, music, and tons of software i installed over the years. But after moving to a fresh install of Win 7, I didnt miss even a small fraction of what was installed on my old PC. But me being me, a data rat packer, I couldn't give up or wipe the Vista install when I recently wanted to repurpose the old PC. So I uninstalled all of the games, shrank the Vista partition, did the registry hacks, uninstalled all of the hardware drivers and did a block level copy using Linux and VboxManage to a virtual disk image on another hard disk. I then moved that image to my desktop PC, created a VM in Virtualbox, pointed it to my image and it worked! So when I need my old desktop I simply open up Virtualbox and run my old PC image. Though I will admit the first few tries failed to boot. It wasn't until I read about the registry hack to change the disk controller to a generic intel controller did it finally work. Then I did the same to the XP PC's at the family business as I was confident in the procedure. I saved money by not having to buy new Windows licenses and had a full Linux install to work in if need be.
Most of my Linux tinkering is also done on a VM running on my Win 7 machine. Since I still game from time to time, running Windows as the primary OS makes sense. Dual booting is so 2000's. No one should be doing it unless they really need the GPU under Linux and need to run Windows natively.
Virtualization is amazing. I cant wait until desktop virtualization becomes mature enough so I don't have to install an OS directly on the hardware. I just want a small thumb drive to hold and boot the hypervisor or the hypervisor is part of the BIOS/EFI. Then run and install OS's from there while being able to give them direct access to hardware if necessary and sharing the GPU. No more hellish driver problems. I can move the image or hard disk to another PC and run the OS. If MS were smart they would make a downloadable Windows image that ran right out of the box, like vmware player. Would make a hell of an option for mobile users: unplug the disk from your PC, plug into laptop and hit the road. when you come home and need more horsepower you can plug back into the main PC.
They won't do that when they are making beaucoup dollars off of it.
- Office
- Exchange
- Sharepoint
- Skype
- OneDrive
- MSN
- Etc...
Then they have software to support and develop for said apps:
- SQL server
- IIS
- Visual Studio
- etc....
Not everything they do is wrong. Windows server and active directory are pretty powerful and easy to manage. They have a huge chunk of small, medium and large IT shops under their influence. The Xbox, while not hugely profitable, is quite successful and they are one of the top two players along with Sony's PSx.
The only really wrong things they did were trying to get into the search engine game with Bing and their flawed mobile push. If they want Mobile they should have done two things: leave the Windows desktop alone and have a 3rd party make the hardware with Microsoft branded all over it like Google's Nexus line. Buying Nokia is a bad move, just have Nokia make a Microsoft exclusive and branded handset. And Metro on the desktop and server (seriously, WTF) has to die. There is no reason for its existence. If Metro on the desktop is so bloody important then let it run in a window side by side with classic applications (aka normal applications.) Make the crappy metro start menu an application that you launch from the start menu or pin it to the task bar. (sorry, had to do a metro rant)
+1 informative.
I did the same for our PC's at the family business. We use Peachtree 2004, and have been using Peachtree since 1999 or so. Of course it won't run in Windows 7 nor will it run under Wine. I moved the XP install from the P4 hardware to a virtualbox VM with a few registry hacks to change the disk controller (the blight of moving windows installs). I then bought new AMD APUs, motherboards and gave each one a 1tb hard disk and 8gb ram (a little over $300 in parts). Installed Xubuntu 12.04, VirtualBox and automatically start the XP VM in full screen.
No re-installing anything so downtime was about a day so and I did it on a sunday. My mother can't tell the difference and XP runs *way* smoother. The benefit comes from the faster CPU, more memory and faster HDD (vs the old 5400RPM ATA disk) for the VM. I can also snapshot the VM or move it to a new PC without worrying about hardware changes. The beauty of a VM: hardware abstraction.
You only boot the system and start the software once a day so an SSD is overkill. I would skip the SSD as you really don't need it unless you have the money to spare or are loading large programs or files constantly. For basic desktop use 1TB is HUGE. I would rather more space for snapshots and other VM's if necessary. A 1TB WD Blue is about 55 bucks on newegg.
I've said it before and ill say it again:
- ALIX board and case running m0n0wall
- Ubiquiti UniFi AP
- Decent switch (I like the metal box Netgear stuff, never had one fail on me yet. Currently I have a GS108T smart switch which lets me port mirror for packet sniffing devices, very handy)
Isolate the WLAN from your LAN. I only let ssh from the WLAN to the LAN. I only use the WLAN for my laptop, phone and tablet. Most of the things I do on those mobile devices are internet related so I don't need nor do I want both networks to be bridged. If I need LAN for my laptop I use a cable from my switch or ssh tunnel. I also disable the router's web configuration page for the WLAN.
Total cost is something like $250 - $300. Expensive to some but to me its totally worth it. I have never had to reboot the m0n0wall router since installing it about 4 or 5 years ago and the only time it was powered down was during hurricane sandy and the few times I needed to move things around so I unplugged it. Sure you could but a WRT54 and flash tomato or ddwrt but you are limited in terms of memory and you have only one LAN, the ALIX has three lan ports and mini PCI. I have only had the Ubiquiti AP for two months so I can't comment on its longevity but so far its been pretty damn solid. I had a WAP54g that started to crap out every day and needed to be rebooted plus its range was pathetic. From the attic to the first floor I had one bar of signal on my mobile devices. The Ubiquiti gives me full bars in the basement. The nice part is it is PoE so you just run an ethernet cable to it and a power injector at the router. You need to install this giant software package to manage and configure the thing but in the end it was worth it.
If you have a fast connection (100+mbps), the ALIX board might be underpowered and you will want to look at the Soekris net6501. Its costly but has four gigabit NIC's, mini PCIe, up to 2GB RAM and 1.6GHz Atom CPU and two PCIe x1 slots. I have been eyeing it for a while to run pfSense but I have no reason to replace the little rock solid ALIX/m0n0wall system.