Posts by Henry Wertz 1

The problems with this type of software:

1) Technical faults (this is when your clock gets mis-set once, or something, and the expiration system expires your totally valid software.)

2) Forced upgrades. These subscription models almost always seem to be tied into keeping the software up to date. If you don't like some new change, or there's an incompatibility with a new release, you're probably SOL.

2.5) Forced upgrades again -- some people just buy a version of some software, it works great, so their costs after that are $0. But with this model you have to pay either way.

3) What if they go out of business? In some cases the company has sent a perpetual license code to their current customers, but other times they've just found out their software will irrevocably drop dead in x time.

4) The "far future". A few have already alluded to this, what does someone do with a copy of this software 20 or 30 years from now?

"I really do worry about how our future generations are going to handle the fact that a larger and larger part of our common culture is being programmed to self destruct after a limited time."

I have to be honest, I haven't seen this. I avoid DRM-infected audio and video, and for Linux there's vanishingly few pieces of software with an expiration.

"Protesting is what you do when the other guy really has no reason to listen to you. Switch to a different IDE or editor. "

People protest whether "the other guy" has a reason to listen or not. To me, it sounds like JetBrains *IS* listening. But there has not been enough time yet to find out if JetBrains will have a useful response, or just make an excuse why they're going subscription. Plus, of course, people currently have a fully purchased copy of IntelliJ IDEA or whichever IDE, so they don't really need to switch in the coming weeks.

They do say how much they make

"In the mean time, since the adverts make money for the free-to-use websites, perhaps there should be a counter on the website telling users how much money they are being paid for each advert..."

Some of the sites I go to say "Your ad here! $2.20" or whatever. (That would be per 1000 views). That price is surely $0.05 or something above what the ad already displayed is paying, so effectively they are already telling me what they are being paid.

Anyway, it's your choice I guess. Block ads, and have some sites block you for it. Or don't.

I do have to throw in here, the guy in the article who claims not watching ads is theft is a jackass. That said, I do think it's within site owner's rights to not serve anybody. If their content is worth it, people might turn off the ad blocker. If the content is not worth it, they'll just go elsewhere (for example, the Washington Post? Why would I change anything to view what is most likely an AP article, when 100s of other sites will have the EXACT same article?)

Personally, when I did run Adblock, I ditched the default block list, I had no interest in blocking every single ad, I wanted to block obnoxious ads that A) force popups, B) unauthorized noise (banner ads that start making noise by themselves are right out. A video site ad, like youtube or netflix ad, I expect it to have sound since the video does.) C) CPU hogging garbage (one ad network that was making the CPU run 100% FOR A STILL BANNER due to piss-poor Javascript). I should note, since I wasn't indiscriminately blocking all sorts of ads, I even went to a few sites people complained wouldn't work for them due to ad blocking, and they worked for me. This brings up a point -- PLEASE don't block based on the existence of Adblock, block based on your ads being blocked. Thanks.

Luckily, the ad networks themselves seem to follow a code of conduct*; when Adblock became briefly incompatible with firefox, I found I only had 3 sites on the blocklist, 2 had cleaned up their acts (the other is a CPU hog, that only seems to affect 1 web site I go to.... I just make sure not to leave the browser on that tab if I value my battery life.) I don't even run adblock any more, I was getting more static from Adblock reminding me it's updated itself or whatever than I was having it block.

*Except porn, warez, and "couchtuner-style" video sites. No advertiser's code of conduct there.... That's the land of the endless popups, they'll do whatever they want. I don't run Windows though so at least I won't get any viruses.

Overpriced books and SUV-buying US'ians

"If you're selling a book priced at $5, I'm much, much more likely to buy it than the same book priced at $10."

And these aren't even books, they're E-Books. $10 is enough where I'd decide "Damn what a ripoff" and not even think of buying it.

"but are they likely to sell twice as many books? Selling the same number of books at half the price is a kind of business suicide."

Per TFA, total money coming into these sellers did drop, so when they doubled prices sales did cut more than half. (And conversely, yes, they would sell more than twice as many books at half price.)

As for cars.. yes, US'ians are actually dumb enough to IMMEDIATELY go out an buy up gas-guzzling SUVs and crap as soon as prices drop. A month later, the news will have a fluff piece with these same purchasers whining about how they didn't think gas prices would go up and they suddenly can't afford the gas, and when they went to dump their gas guzzlers onto somebody else they find out nobody else wants it either.

"If you look at the images they have not made their own which looks similar to the 'original' but have just cropped a section off. Anyone can, I expect, make their own but they chose to use someone elses image without attribution to the source."

I was unclear about this at first too. But if you look fully, 2600 licenses an ENTIRE inkblot (for whatever reason), but used just the corner. Whoever made this Getty photo also used the whole thing (did they license it or just rip it off?) Getty then copyright trolled 2600 by claiming this corner of the inkblot, which was not original to the photo, is copyright infringement.

What do *I* think should happen? I think, in a general sense, companies that use automated systems to detect "infringements", then automatically sends out demands (instead of having a human review them), should owe damages when they make clearly false copyright infringement claims. I do hope 2600 takes action against Getty over this.

Hmm...

So, looks like the "cloud" part (where it sends everything to mbed.org...) would be optional. Without that, the rest of this "device stack" would involve whatever devices broadcasting whatever info they are outputting via UDP. It sounds like if this UDP traffic was bridged onto your LAN, you could view or control this via a phone app without anything leaving the LAN.

Not that I can think of a good use for why I'd want this.... but this setup isn't an automatic information grab at least.

I think it's a reasonable idea.

I think this is a reasonable idea. I seriously doubt anyone who nicks a device goes in and spoofs the MAC address. My mom pointed out one issue, who writes down the MAC address of their device? That said, I wouldn't want the police routinely logging MAC address versus location (since it could be used to track people's movements), but it sounds like this is just fed in a "hot list" of MACs and would alert when it saw one. That certainly beats the "nothing at all" that can typically be done to find stolen hardware.

Yep

Yep. 4G was supposed to be at least 100mbps peak speed. And it is. You're comparing "expected" speeds with peak speeds. The initlal LTE rollout VZW did (10x10mhz in the 700mhz band) peaked at like 75mbps. It didn't quite meet the speed minimum, but was obviously a new technology compared to the existing 3G systems*. Now, however, they've rolled out additional LTE in AWS and possibly PCS, and it all supports aggregation, so now peak is well over 100mbps.

*(Unlike AT&T, and IWireless, to name and shame two, who falsely began relabelling even 3.6mbps HSPA as "4G". Really confusing now that AT&T has LTE as well, so now they claim to have 2 4G networks, although they really have 1 or 0 depending on how strict you want to be.)

Anyway, color me cynical. I have 0 interest in even more speeds, given the extreme cost of service. I've got grandfathered unlimited data... but, I don't care if I could get 500mbps when they're charging $6.67-$30/GB! (1GB of data -- $30, 3GB for $45, 6GB for $60 or 12GB for $80.. oh that's with *0* lines, they then charge $20 a line to use that data! And, insanely, above the 12GB plan, they have more but the price per GB goes back *up* to $15/GB!)

Nope.

"Isn't that the normal procedure for all left leaning administrations with greater surveillance and oppression the further to the left they are?"

Nope, it's pretty much US-specific to have two main political parties (and basically no functional 3rd parties) that both effectively act as 1 party. Both parties (per their voting history, not rhetoric) hate freedom and want a huge, intrusive, expensive government; but ask members of either party and the lost rights and huge, intrusive, expensive gov't are all "the other party's" fault.

"Arctic fox, they're probably American. I get the impression there's a different perception of where the centre is there."

Yup. The link you linked to sums it up pretty well. You've got two political parties that, well Republicans INSIST the Democrats are all these crazy nut-job left wing hippies, and Democrats INSIST the Republicans are all these right-wing big-wig plutocrats. They, in reality, have EXACTLY the same political views and just split hairs over the most minute details. BOTH insist it's the OTHER PARTIES fault there's so much government spending, will come up with a list of programs to cut, but then have an equally big list of programs they want to ad. Both claim they want freedom and rights, but both* voted for all the things like DMCA, Patriot Act, etc. and seem to race each other to take away rights (while, of course, blaming it all on the other party.)

*Ron Paul's run as a Republican, and in Congress actually spoke out against all this AND voted against it. But he's not really a Republican, he's a libertarian, he just runs as a Republican due to the US's broken "2 party" (effectively 1 party) system.

Don't forget rental 8-)

"We will never, EVER, sell your data to any 3rd party. For any price"

Don't forget rental -- spammers used to do this. "We'll never sell your E-Mail address". They actually wouldn't sell it... they'd "rent" the E-Mail list out, and if the rentee just happened to copy it at that point, well....

Two MAJOR problems here:

1) The lack of audit trail. This is seriously stupid, I would opt out of a scheme like this.

2) My understanding was once you were in the system, you wouldn't be able to opt out later? This is wrong. It's easy enough (if you opt out of electronic records) to have, say, your main doctor, print out your records, then (once they are back in paper form) stick them into a folder and have them delete the electronic records. This way if someone planned to abuse the system ("rent" or give away records to 3rd parties) you could opt out then.

Well...

Well.. it is a little troubling when you have all these battles being fought (US, UK, etc.) without any sort of declaration of war. This could raise legal questions.

But, ISIS controls a definite area, with a de facto capitol, there's a line where they don't control territory past it, and there's heated territorial battles along the border as it's expands out or is pushed back. De facto, this is a war. Anyone fighting in a war zone cannot really expect to be exempt from harm because of their nationality.

"Smart" services

"Would it be awfully wrong of me to suggest that if you do have a smart device with Amazon Video built in, like a TV or BluRay, you should register it ASAP, to make sure you get any discount offers applicable? Think of it as a £39 tax rebate."

Yeah, given their zeal to pull support, I wouldn't bother buying a FireTV. Amazon'll probably just pull support for it in a year or two anyway.

"It may not be smart to buy a smart TV, but is there any choice anymore?"

I've had no problem finding TVs that just watch TV. The TV vendors put a big markup on the "connected" TVs, but also don't want to lose out selling less expensive TVs to everyone else.

I also have to throw in a barb at Sony -- not surprised Sony's are not being supported. My friend bought one of the first Sony DVD players (like "model 100"), which had "firmware updateable" as a main feature on the box. He figured that'd be important, it was very likely the bugs had not been worked out yet. Within 6 months, it would not play some DVDs due to fimrware incompatibilities -- Sony told him that was a shame, they were providing NO firmware updates for it, he could buy the "model 101". Needless to say he did not, he bought another brand.

I intend to write the fcc

I intend to write (E-Mail or whatever) the FCC. What can I say? First, every AP I've used (except some Ciscos and Ubiquitys) the stock firmware has ranged from poor to piss poor, I wouldn't buy ANY AP DD-WRT can't run on. I've also had several phones where the carrier never did release updates fixing critical bugs on the phone, I updated it with Cyanogenmod. Second, with enough interest any device can be cracked and updated, all forms of DRM (Digital Rights Mrestriction) are a waste of developer time that could be spent on something useful, and this type of attempted restriction is a prticular waste.

If the privacy policy doesn't say it it doesn't apply

"Yes, we still need to provide greater detail in the body of the policy, but those details are, and will always be, in keeping with the fundamental privacy principles we outline in the Introduction."

Thing is, if Spotify explain "this data is needed for functionality x and y, and this data is needed for z", well, that's nice. But if the privacy policy itself doesn't restrict use of the data to x, y, and z, then once Spotify gets their hands on the data they can use it for whatever purpose they want.

Full diclosure

Welp, I'm a believer in full disclosure anyway. And this provides another good reason for this -- if blackhats will get ahold of the exploits anyway*, then the other users may as well get a fair chance to see just what they are currently vulnerable (and possibly be able to mitigate it instead of just being left in the dark.)

*Even if you pretend they can get perfect security, there's nothing stopping a bug report from getting to the vendor AND to the blackhat community.

Yeah, but...

"Now it is cheaper to buy a new Washing Machine rather than change a drum bearing."

Yeah, but... when my fridge broke (compressor failure), I bought a new fridge. It's got a temperature knob in the freezer, and a blend door kind of thing to adjust the fridge temp. Given it just has a themostat and a bit of electronics to cycle the compressor and fan on and off as appropriate, I doubt there's a bit of digital electronics in there. The washer and dryer are a normal washer and dryer, with knobs on it that clunk various relays or solenoids or whatever as they're turned. Are these not available any more in the UK, because they are here in the states. I don't see it being likely at all for IoT to be forced onto an unwilling public because non-IoT models are unavailable.

"This - Why can't they add a plugin or something to support "crap SSL" - it can turn the whole damned window red if it likes - but just occasionally a bit of embedded kit needs a reset, and goes into https only mode with SSL3."

I thought TFA said that there WOULD (for firefox at least) be a config option to turn on that would re-enable RC4.

Not because it's Asus

I'm not a cynical about this because it's Asus, I've had a few Asus motherboards and they were great. I'm a tad cynical because it's a laptop with a big-ass external radiator you've got to carry around with it.

Drivers and Xiaomi

"I don't know why you're getting down-votes because it's absolutely true. I've had to throw away perfectly good hardware because the drivers were not updated beyond Windows XP too."

And I've gotten to enjoy hand-me-down, perfectly working hardware, because people got rid of it due to it only having XP drivers... but Linux's drivers continued to support the hardware to the present day. People tend to have this fantasy that "Windows supports everything", blurring together support of Windows 98, 2000, XP, 7, and 8/8.1/10, ignoring that newer Windows versions indeed do lose or drop support for older hardware (which may not even be that old.) Linux, once an open source driver comes out the hardware is basically supported forever. In the case of a "binary blob" driver... once the vendor drops support for some hardware, you may be S.O.L. if the binary blob is expected to load straight into the kernel (for most drivers) or X.Org (for video drivers.) You may be fine if there's enough of a wrapper between the blob and kernel or X.Org... you may also be fine if the "driver" runs in user mode (for instance, Linux supports USB done from user mode, and printing in Linux usually is done from user mode too.)

As for the Xiaomi -- I'm not that interested in an Air type device, even half the cost of an Air is pretty high for me. But I'm interested in seeing what the hardware specs are on this bad boy, and see if Xiaomi comes out with lower cost ones. I'm also interested to see if they install some nice Linux distro or something nasty.

Case dismissed?

"Each defendant has been confirmed to be using the Popcorn Time file sharing software that is specifically designed for and intended for committing theft, including theft of plaintiff's motion picture," the suit reads."

Looks to me like the case should be dismissed. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement, not theft. So, no theft took place, no use of "burglarly tools or theft devices" either. If they really want to bother, they should refile with the proper charges.

What Mage said.

What Mage said; this is true in the US too.

The telcos here ALREADY have all sorts of spectrum they are not using, for several reasons 1) Handsets must support it. 2) They must upgrade sites (either add more antennas, replace the antenna with a fancier multi-band antenna, and either add more radios or replace the radios with a software defined radio with enough frequency coverage.) 3) They simply don't have to, they bought the spectrum at auction (not rented like in UK), and ridiculously there are NO useage or buildout requirements* so companies can just buy it and sit on it.

Furthermore, cellcos here have barely begun to pursue small cell sites, or microcells (other than ones people buy for use in a household if it's a dead spot otherwise). They'd rather just take all the spectrum and (eventually) add it to existing sites rather than ever adding a capacity site.

As for "sharing" spectrum.. big problem. Many people here are very far from their stations, and do not necessarily use the "in-market" stations. I, for example, am about 10 miles away from 2 stations, but 55 miles or so away from the other supposedly "in-market" stations. Those stations suck though, so I point my antenna east-southeast and pull in out of market stations 60 miles away. But, some greedy cell co. would blast right over my stations under this type of plan, just so they could ask "Are you REALLY sure you don't want 4GB of data for 'just' $80 a month?" or whatever.

*800mhz cellular was grandfathered in, but if they didn't built out in some market, another company could petition to take the license. The first 1900mhz PCS auctions had some buildout requirements, but it was like 50% population coverage in a market within 10 years or the like. Ridiculously, companies got away with putting up 1 "license saver" site in the middle of some rural town to count for this... a "license saver" site will not show coverage on coverage maps, will not even provide service to their own customers, but despite it being useless they get to claim to the FCC it "covers" the population. Later 1900mhz and auctions after that have typically had NO buildout requirement whatsoever. Want to sit on it for 20 years just to lock out potential competition? Go ahead!

"Proper" Windows laptop?

"Surely for this money you can get a proper Windows laptop theses days? Chrome isn't exactly an appealing option in that case."

I find Windows unappealing personally. If I'm going to stick a nice Ubuntu install on my computer anyway... a) I don't want to be falsely counted as some kind of Windows customer when I'm NEVER going to use Windows, and I don't want ANY of my money going to Microsoft. b) I'd rather have an ARM, the battery life is SO much better and with Linux (unlike Windows), there's not some big downside because it's not x86. c) As jason7 says, Windows is nasty on these lower-spec machines (that Linux will run between 'adequately' and 'pretty well' on.)

Change to the user agreement?

"Why is it that Comments rubbishing Ubuntu (Unity, I assume) always seem to come from 'Mint' Evangelists, and usually from the 'Mate' congregation? It always seems to strike me as trying to make up for an inferiority complex."

Probably because Mint and Mate come out of the box without any of the types of changes Unity made to the UI. I just install the "Ubuntu flashback" and don't have to deal with Unity.

Shouldn't there be a change to the user agreement, or at least a notification, to this much new information being collected? I mean, when people install Win10 it's there in the fine print that they can collect virtually anything they want, and people know what they are getting into. Adding all sorts of "telemetry" in like this seems very shady. (I'm glad I'm not using Windows personally.)

The quote's right

Theo De Raadt's quote, I really can't disagree with it. Honestly the x86 design is not that great, it was not designed for virtualization, the pre-virtualization-extension hacks pull some pretty nasty tricks to work at all, and virtualization extension is still quite a hack.

That said, virtualization serves a practical purpose, runs on x86 even though it's a hack, and people have x86 systems whether it's good for virtualization or not. So... have at it.

Yeah, OK

Yeah, OK. If they build single-purpose VMs with custom kernel as opposed to "containers", just brainstorming, they can have:

Custom kernel, it knows it's running on VMWare, so it only needs to probe for hardware VMware actually supports. Paravirtualized hard disk and network, and tickless (although I think most kernels do this by default anyway.) Take out unnecessary time delays from the kernel (that real hardware may need but virtualized doesn't... like delays while probing PCI bus, USB, delays for disks to spin up or "settle", and on.)

Custom userland... customized bootup, you can have a pretty minimal init that just runs whatever the container/VM is supposed to run. And only whatever libraries the particular application you are running needs. I think some containers already do this -- if you just containerize a whole Linux install you've got a GB or 2 of stuff in there, but if the container contains only needed libs it could be under 50MB.

Just saying...

Just saying, with these plans it was made pretty clear you got 7GB of tethering, and then a speed throttle on the tethering (which beats the hell out of a cash overage). They apparently *do* have ways to detect this, they were letting it ride and now are deciding not to. They have other plans where you get "x GB of data at full speed", and they don't care if you're tethering or not, since you're going through your data either way. This plan is actually on the site as "Unlimited 4G LTE data* on-smartphone only." (Then the asterisk lists a policy they apparently started very recently where it's actually 21GB then your service is 'deprioritized' compared to others... versus other plans having a 128kbps throttle after your allotment. Probably should be listed as 21GB 4G LTE honestly.)

Background for Brits on here, Verizon (CDMA/EVDO/LTE) has the most widespread network, followed by AT&T (GSM/HSPA/LTE), but their prices are quite high. Sprint and T-Mobile are both significantly less expensive. Sprint (CDMA/EVDO/LTE) has somewhat less coverage but allows roaming in quite a few areas, and T-Mobile (GSM/HSPA/LTE*) has somewhat less coverage and somewhat less roaming, but lots of data capacity in the cities.

*T-Mobile are in the process of upgrading rural coverage that was still EDGE or even GPRS. They're bypassing HSPA entirely in these areas, they will be GSM+LTE. They're already running VoLTE so the GSM usage may be quite low even for voice traffic.

Parties and judges

Re. US political parties, due to the broken US political system "forcing" virtually everyone into just two parties, both main parties (Republicans and Democrats) are for the most part completely centrist, with almost the exact same political views (large, intrusive government... while both falsely claiming they want to lower taxes and spending, claiming it's the OTHER parties fault spending is out of control.). But both main parties have various "radical fringes" that try, to varying degrees of success, to take over the party platform for one or the other party, or force their candidate into candidacy.

As for the judge... I do see his defence as sound, that his assistant replied and he didn't. If he's not micromanaging his assistant, they can make a "wrong" decision every now and then. I must say I found his defence quite unhelpful, however. It's one thing to say you're very busy, and have an assistant go through your E-Mail for you. Fair enough I guess. IMHO, it makes him sound downright mentally incompetent when he claims he's INCAPABLE of operating an E-Mail client... clicking an icon (to start the E-Mail client or web site), then clicking some subject lines checkboxes then clicking "delete"... or clicking a subject line and reading the text off the screen... are simply not too difficult.

Up and downsides

To me, Bitcoin has several upsides and downsides.

Upsides: 1) Secure transactions, it's proveable a transaction took place and to what wallet. 2) Limited bitcoin production rate. You know in the US, these jackasses were actually going to mint a $1 trillion platinum memorial coin, and just deposit that in the treasury so they could claim the feds had plenty of money on hand? They somehow think creating $1 trillion out of nothing whatsoever would not affect the inflation rate or people's perceptions of the currency. This can't happen with bitcoins.

Downsides: 1) Scalablility. a) Number of bitcoins circulating is rather low if it becomes very widely used, it's a bit ridiculous to have to deal with like .000001BTC to make smaller transactions. b) The blockchain problem discussed.. 2) Possible market manipulation. The whole bitcoin market really is small enough that a few (or possibly just one) wealthy investor could manipulate values of the entire market; "buy low and sell high" is pretty easy when you can individually manipulate the price. 3) Volatility. I was shocked to see 1BTC is back down to like $228.28. It was like $800+ apiece a matter of months ago, and peaked at $1100 per BTC. 4) Exchanges. This is a concern of any currency, but due to Bitcoin's extreme volatility and size of the market could be a particular concern. If people are buying bitcoins low and selling them high, would this not eventually end up with exchanges with large amounts of bitcoins but few dollars? If someone actually wanted to cash in, say, 4,000 BTC (a bit over $900,000), would an exchange have enough money? Even if they had 1,000,000 BTC, could they *exchange* 4,000 BTC with any other exchanges to raise that much money in a reasonable length of time?

Exploring the scalability problem, it really is tricky, even if a lot of bitcoin'ers agree on a new specification, there's the trick of "mining rigs", as well as making sure everyone who CAN switch over does so fast enough. I don't know for sure, but I have this suspicion that mining rig builders make take this as an opportunity to say "no software updates for you" for anything but the very latest model, and mining activity will somewhat drop off. If they rush a change, they'll use a lot of users, and if they don't rush it it'll probably never get done. Tricky.

Maybe not

"Unfortunately, they'll be digging in no further than 10% into those crates of paper by the time the use of Stingrays by law enforcement will be made perfectly legal (retroactively, natch). "

Maybe not. After all, the judges so far seem pretty unsympathetic and troubled that the use of this technology was concealed from the court.

It really is unnecessary

On the one hand, they had a warrant to install some spyware on this guys computer, and it was targeted to a single individual, so whatever.

On the other hand, it really isn't necessary to put AP stuff on there -- considering the spyware would have installed as soon as he clicked the link, the visible page content could have been a generic news page, completely blank, or "pwned by the FBI".

How many duplicates?

How many duplicate installs? I'm sure there are plenty of actual installs on real hardware. But check this out...

So, I installed a WIn10 prerelease into a VM, and once RTM shipped I wanted to know if this VM was portable or if activation would screw it up (I have no intention of moving it around, but wanted to know if it'd blow up if I had to replace any hardware, especially after a year when Win7 to WIn10 upgrade would not work). Installed a prelease, later updated to RTM -- activation failed (turns out, after about a 1 day window where upgrades from prelease to RTM worked, one had to go back to Win7/8/8.1 and do an upgrade to Windows 10. Thank goodness for Virtual Machines). So, this counted as an install. Went to a Win7 VM, upgraded it to Win10 (hardware in VirtualBox was slightly different, so this counted as a new install.) Fiddled SLIGHTLY with VM hardware settings, Windows went unactivated, updated again from Win7 (counted as a new install.) Tried moving this from a 2.4ghz Core2Duo to 3.0ghz Core2Duo system to see if the VM was at all portable -- activation failed. I did a Win7->Win10 upgrade on there (counted as a new install.) I discarded this VM, re-installed the VM from the 2.4ghz, but fiddled with VirtualBox's CPUID settings (activation failed, CPUID was different from the 2.4 *and* the 3.0, so counted as a new install.) Fiddled with more VirtualBox CPUID settings (activation failed, but would have counted as ANOTHER new install.) Then, even though Win10 was already activated on the 2.4, I installed a KMS crack on the VM anyway so I wouldn't have to worry about it (I don't think this will phone home and count as any more installs if it's moved around.)

This means their methodology would count my single install of Windows 10 as 6 unique installs. How many people have fiddled with VirtualBox or (god forbid) something like VMWare VMotion where a virtual machine can *automatically* migrate to another computer?

"Now, about this plan of yours...where is the GOOD part? (And I know I will be downvoted...but honestly, did you think this through?)"

First, your premise is flawed. AT&T are greedy bastards, and already will be making a profit at the lower price, with 0 ads. The ads are just ADDITIONAL profits, not money they are counting on to operate the service. The $29 (or $44, or whatever) fee is just additional money they are charging because they can. If they get no ads served, they will not raise the price. They are charging monopoly pricing for gigabit service, see all these other markets where Google is already there, and AT&T's pricing is magically much lower than it is in Silicon Valley.*

Second, I don't want any ISP (or anyone else) sniffing my traffic; this is greasy at best. And injecting content into websites AT&T does not operate should be (and possibly is) flat-out illegal. If AT&T wants to put ads wherever, they should deal with ad brokers like everyone else.

*I'm waiting for ANY decent service here... CenturyLink (DSL provider, who does not allow 3rd party DSL on their system) and Mediacom (cable company) effectively run a duopoly here, with pricing so high that the usual "expensive last resort" of satellite internet is actually price competitive with their offerings.

Old School, and Ilya

"There is nothing new here, just Old Skool 2.0.

Ever the cry of those who can't be bothered to learn about what they're commenting on."

I don't know if that was the point, I think the point is that it may be worth finding historical articles on non-relational database techniques in addition to reading brand-new tutorials. Some won't apply, but some will; those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. I've seen this before, where some new software or programming technique or language comes out that has attributes closely resembling something that "went out of style" 15 or 20 years ago. Then, all sorts of optimizations, tips and techniques are "discovered" that actually were in regular use 15-20 years ago (but not used more recently because they'd be incompatible or ineffective with what was used in the interim.) In this case, dig up the old knowledge on what techniques helped with pre-SQL database systems, to see if there's anything applicable to NoSQL.

Ilya, with all due respect, I don't know if SQL is even in much trouble. I must agree, even though convential databases are used for it, SQL is pretty unsuitable for lexical analysis, categorization, natural language search, and so on. But, loads of databases are NOT used for this purpose; for example, I can't see someone replacing a database with account #, address, what services they're signed up for, and payment records, with some kind of lexically analyzed searchable system, because they simply are not performing those kind of searches.

deadlockvictim, I know you're quoting lexiclone's old site. Don't know what to say about this, I'm not dubious about Ilya's lexical analysis software, but I am dubious that Ilya has come up with a "One Law of Nature" or done anything with the Bible (I'm sure he analyzed it... but it's such a large body of text, with people willing to accept so little sensible information as "proof" that their technique worked... like a few words, possibly misspelled... that almost any numerological or text analysis technique "works" by that criteria.)

Pushing the hardware?

I'm wondering if this isn't an issue that shows up when the Juniper (or some links on it) hit 100% load, i.e if they'd had a slightly larger Juniper, or one additional Juniper on site, it wouldn't have happened.. It shouldn't just blow up, but I've heard about some of this higher-speed hardware (25gig, 40gig, 100gig) not implementing flow control, and having to decide if it'll attempt to buffer packets or drop them if a link actually hits 100% load. Buffering can cause unreasonable latency fluctuations. But dropping, some types of traffic will apparently assume perfect traffic delivery, despite using UDP or raw ethernet frames (neither of which guarantees delivery.) That's on top of other potential problems people have already brought up.

edit: maybe not, the NOC post linked to suggests routing issue.

It's too bad...

It's too bad it takes apparently 4 years for these charges to work their way through to the court to where he actually gets his jail time.

Greasy

Honestly I don't know if they should have to make a payout just for the data breach -- it really depends on if they were negligent with their security, or if it was fairly up to snuff and the hackers did something really tricky to get the data. (I do suspect the data security was rather lax.) But charging to delete an account, then not actually deleting it? GREASY. They should be absolutely taken to the cleaners for this.

And this is why I do not give a website ANY information unless I'm quite sure I'll never want to take it back. Many sites do not have a "delete my info" option, and ones that claim they do will OFTEN lie and just "make the information inaccessible" or something instead of, you know, actually deleting it.

What are they being (attempted) sued for?

What are they being sued for? Maybe Norway has one of those "streaming is illegal" laws but US does not.

Bittorrent opens one up to potential problems because you're bittorrent client is actually uploading fragments of whatever file to others, if the file is copyrighted it's deemed your bittorrent client is committing copyright infringement on your behalf. In the US, streaming is 100% legal, the company doing the streaming is committing copyright infringement, the person viewing the stream is not (unless you're using downloadhelper -- naughty naughty!)

There's no 'Oh, but there's a temporary copy in the computer's RAM' type situation either -- this got hashed out with DVDs already in the US. Some weisenheimer (probably Motion Picture Ass. of America but I don't recall) tried to argue the like 8MB buffer in (unauthorized) DVD playback software was an unauthorized copy. They were told to take a hike because a) This is not some superfluous buffer, it's required for playback. b) The buffer is in volatile storage (in other words, it's in RAM... probably a temp file would be covered too.. writing out an .avi or .flv into Downloads would not be covered.)

Re: Illegal operation?

Providing customized hardware and support is illegal in EU? I don't get it.

Word is bond, and the T&Cs are the word

"I don't see what the big deal is? Yes, they could have been a little bit more transparent about why they wanted the permissions in the first place, but at least they do have reasons for requiring the permissions"

The big deal is, the T&Cs appear to allow them to collect any and all information off the phone, for any reason (or for no reason at all) and to give this data to whoever they want for any reason (or, again, for no reason at all.) It literally doesn't matter what someone at the company claims the intent was, word is bond and the T&Cs are the word. If they had intended for less data to be used for a more limited purpose, they can state more limited data collection and usage in the T&Cs.

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if everyone at Spotify didn't have the best of intentions, and just ended up with an overly broad data use T&Cs. But that's the problem, lets say for sake of argument Spotify goes evil in a year. With T&Cs that allow for limited data collection for limited purposes, you'll get a warning something has gone wrong when "evil Spotify" has to update it's T&Cs. With T&Cs already allowing unlimited data collection for any purpose and a vague assurance that there's not too much data actually being collected, you'll get no warning, "evil Spotify" already has T&Cs letting them do whatever they want and can freely ignore whatever assurances they gave previously.

If you're saying "I don't see what the big deal is?" because you don't care one bit about your privacy.. I have nothing to to say in response, except you'll probably regret giving away your privacy sooner or later.

" I believe his function is to corral the loony right under one banner"

I actually take this as a sign of the US's broken political system. In normal countries, the loony right have their own political party; the loony left have their own party; there'll be a party that is more or less centrist (which would more or less encompass the "core" of both main US parties), and probably a few parties along the *other* political spectrum (strong state versus individual liberties, which the US ignores in favor of pretending there is only "left" versus "right").

The last several elections, the Democrats will have some bland centrists (meaning "center" politically) and some "we need a giant state for handouts" types, but more or less have kept things under control candidate-wise, having some minimal cohesion. The Republicans, due to the broken political system you'll end up with "we need a big state and military" types, *and* isolationists, *and* libertarians, *and* nutjob religious fundamentalists, *and* whatever Trump is, besides the usual bland centrists, all vying for control of the party, to set the platform, and to get all the candidates. In other words, people that would be under at lest 2 or 3 different parties in a normal country will vie for control and candidacy in this single party.

They vary

"This weeks column has gone right over my head, is 37 to young to be getting the innuendo jokes? "

I don't think so. He references Beavis and Butthead, and they would turn EVERYTHING into an innuendo, sort of. "Hey, go mow the lawn!" "Hehe... mow". "Go get some lunch" "Hehe... he said get".

That said... I must agree, those self-checkouts are CRAP. I favor employment and use a live checkout every time. They do vary though -- Hy-Vee's more or less work, and although the display was rather sluggish you could actually scan items and shove in money as fast as you want, and I saw it complain about the weight once but didn't interrupt the checkout process anyway. Walmart's is basically garbage, very slow, it makes you wait for it to catch up before you do anything (who wants to pause like 5-10 seconds between scanning each item?), it constantly is whining about wanting items removed and re-added to the checkout (and just stops dead until you do), and even worse I saw it flat-out crash out in mid-checkout when someone was trying to use it. I refuse to even use it.

Slow sales too.

"Hazarding a guess but the very short dev-test-preview loop was far too short and the pipeline too long to work correctly."

I think this supply pipeline also has become "longer" than usual, as inventory of Windows 8/8.1 systems have built up on the warehouses and store shelves.

"Why not reload the excess computers with some flavor or other of Linux? The sellers and re-sellers might come out ahead a buck or two by being able to sell them in a timely manner."

It seems like the OEMs etc. should do something, stick a nice Linux distro on there, or throw Win10 on them as the case may be. But maybe the inventory of Win8.1 systems is still draining out fast enough for them, I don't know.

Linux and patch policy

"Have you tried explaining to her that Linux allows her to do a bunch of stuff the average user has absolutely no interest in while losing highly desired abilities?"

Not really, because the people I usually talk to want to use a web browser, play facebook games (flash), mount usb sticks, and play videos... maybe light word processing, pulling photos off their phone or camera and sometimes printing an scanning.

Anyway.. as for the policy of not describing these cumulative updates, I'm guessing there are just so many changes throughout the system that it wouldn't be useful to enumerate them all. I mean, when I had a VM with Ubuntu 14.04 on it a few months before release (like February or March or so), each and every update was listed in update manager, but there were like 100 a week so it was honestly not that useful.

Sounds like the old Alienware systems

Sounds like this would go into something like the Alienware systems of old. Some of them had dual hard drives and dual SLI video cards, and usually an option of some desktop processors to gain that extra bit of speed, never mind the intense heat. Apparently the battery life on one like that was about 30 minutes, I for sure would not have wanted that much hot air (let alone the hot computer itself) anywhere near my lap.

Nice!

This board and chipset really sounds like a beast.

I did have one system I overclocked, to very good effect, without CPU speedup at all. I had a K62-450 (450mhz), which I found under stress test of rebuilding firefox was not even stable at 475mhz. But, I could set it from stock 4.5x100mhz to 4x112mhz, and it was rock solid. The 12% RAM (and PCI, it was based off main system clock on this system) speedup must have knocked off a wait state or something because the benchmark speedup was closer to 25%.

"Yup. that's the Linux/FOSS world in a nutshell. It's reminiscent of the 'Peoples Popular Front of Judea' scene in Monty Python's The Life of Brian."

It's not really. This happens pretty regularly... a project splits, one branch becomes much more active than the other, but the less active branch keeps going at least for a while. It's not "27 crappy apps", and it doesn't end up with a bunch of people wasting time on an inactive project... it's inactive, most of the development effort goes into the active one. Simple as that.

Does anyone know, at this point, what are the big differences between Libreoffice and OpenOffice anyway? I mean, a few years ago they looked exactly the same to me (other than LibreOffice having a box that says "LibreOffice" instead of "OpenOffice" when it starts up 8-)

I assumed it WAS for 8086s

"Next time: the 8086 "

Actually, I was surprised to read they were pulling tanks, I assumed they were pulling electronics for the microchips. Two reasons they have the kind of tech they do:

1) In space, anything past about a 486-era chip* beings seeing significant problems with errors due to the level of cosmic rays and such in space.

2) Looooong development times, along with technology reuse.

*As the process used to make the chip was shrunk, bit errors increased -- slightly under earth conditions but excessively in space conditions -- I read a Pentium in orbit would misexecute several times a day, so I have no idea how bad a i7 would be. The PowerPCs, MIPS, etc. that are on satellites now use several features to mitigate this.... First, some use different materials (they used to use silicon-on-sapphire which helps a lot.) Second, I think they still use much larger than typical process sizes (no 22nm for sure... a 486 was about 800nm.) This is one reason they end up using PowerPC and MIPS so much, because the die size can be kept reasonable using much older processes. Third, some chips duplicate the instruction pipeline, if there is a mismatch it can be backed up and re-executed (some don't have this, if it's part of a system that is run in duplicate or triplicate anyway, then it could be overkill.) But you get the large process size for free if you just use antique chips 8-)

Not a partisan hack

" partisan hack hasn't bothered to sue the current President or his cronies even after Snowden shows that universal blanket surveillance is going on and even actively protected by the likes of Pelosi."

This suit is over events in 2002, so suing the current President for it would not make sense. This is no partisan issue, insofar as both main parties seem to fully condone the US being a surveillance state.