Re: But at what cost?
T-mobile rocks if you live on the coasts but the coverage is pretty shitty in between for most part.
6570 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Apr 2007
Hardly some fanboi (clue is I'm not AC and post history is pretty harsh to Microsoft over all). Just going off what I remember when I was big into running BOINC on my rigs some time back. I think if you check the stats you will see Windows on like hardware racking up more BOINC points but again maybe things have changed in the last 7 years or so. Of course in general Linux especially owns scientific computing due to the scalability, open source flexibility and not having to buy 2048 windows licenses or whatever. (among many other reasons) *nix also obviously gives you a lot of advantages such as security and stability that relatively newcomers to the Windows world.
>and might produce very different results to taking an application written for Windows and re-writing parts to make it compile and run on Linux.
Granted my info is dated but what I saw from BOINC and its ilk is in general windows blew the door off *nix for scientific computing on regular non massively parallel systems (talking %10 to %50 better). Much of this was due to much more effort being put in to optimizing the compilers and application code itself for the OS running on the vast majority of desktops. I am hardly some windows lover but generally when Linux is as fast as Windows on something its a win.
>consider forms of virtualization which use as little as possible in terms of hardware accel features
Not really related but I know the people working on fq_codel didn't have a lot of nice things to say about NIC offloads and what they did to latency in the name of throughput.
And for the record yes skilled snowboarders don't take the top off moguls but the only time you see only skilled snowboarders on the slopes is on TV. Pretty consistently you do see the reason the ski patrol is on the bunny slope is due to some dumbass deciding to try snowboarding without head gear.
Being able to get his whole collection for $1 on the kindle (long live public domain and fug you Disney for trying to take it away) make his stories just entertaining enough to look past his virulent racism. No way I give a modern author the benefit of the doubt of even being half as big a bigot though. Excellent creepy universe he created but not sure about naming things in the real world after it though.
>Does this warfare on foreign ground kind of thing generally require the approval of the people's democratically elected representatives?
Yes but sadly really only one, the POTUS. Congress doesn't actually like doing anything so this was another power they gave away (unofficially at least) to the POTUS during the Vietnam era. Starting wars (sorry make that conflicts, wars still technically require Congressional approval, and worrying about getting Congress on board after) is one of the few things the POTUS actually has control over which is why its rather amusing to see people picking presidents based on their supposed economic plans which are all bullshit anyway and Congress now doesn't even pretend to care what the POTUS suggests.
Yeah the grid may be ok except for the short term but if it took out a good portion of the satellites including say GPS that might actually be more disruptive. I just know our susceptibility to EMP (what massive solar flare would basically be) is greater today than any time in the past. If we got hit by a Carrington level event I have a strong feeling that people won't be comparing its effects to that piddly blackout in 2003. Civilization ender no but without much recent historical precedent either.
Hacks aside at some point we are due for another Carrington event and if it seriously screwed up 1860ish technology it will screw us over like no rogue nation can. Its is already possible for our electrical grid to be shutdown for up to 18 months (by destroying right infrastructure). The lights being on are not as certain a thing as the sun rising like some may believe.
>"Historically we are bad at defending against threats and very good at panicking about them," he said. "Panic is more dangerous to liberty than the threats themselves."
I tend to think of Bruce more as a hack but bravo for saying this. Of course IIRC Heinlein said something similar many decades ago but that is remarkably often the case. Also calls to mind that asshat of the first order Tommy Franks saying if we had another terrorist attack we might have to get rid of the constitution.
>Hold on, let me get this straight - so you insist keeping your anonymity on a website that you subsequently entrust with your credit card details ...
Well does keep your ISP and everyone but the website at least from knowing you buy sex toys on the first Thursday of the month or whatever.
>Best to block it and get the stuff you need off those 3.5" cover disks on the front of magazines.
Or you know you can browse using a Tails OS iso as read only storage in a VM. That way not only does nothing persist between VM reboots (including said malware or other junk advertisers track you with, also exploiting out of VMs is relatively rare (compared to say flash flaws or whatever) and 0 days largely beyond the skiddies) but you also get the advantage of turn key tor browsing so your ISP and their advertising buddies can go fug off as well. With unity mode its relatively seamless with your regular desktop. The drawbacks of course are having to use FF derivatives (I don't mind) and having to download a new 1 gig iso every few weeks (again not a biggie for me).
>>Many eyes, all rubbish at spotting security vulnerabilities.
>.. is used by huge amounts of servers and is at the centre of many security systems, it is in the spotlight of all the researchers
Finally answering the question can a big enough hairball spaghetti code base from hell (which OpenSSL is) be patched sufficiently even with the whole internet trying. Perhaps but you are going to be seeing critical/severe OpenSSL CVEs for years to come and the vast majority won't be in code written in the last few years or going forward.
LibreSSL is still forced to use OpenSSL broken ass api for compatibility reasons. At least there is nss (among many others) and I do believe the LibreSSL folks did also release a library with a sane ssl api. Which is good for new apps but sadly the trojan like OpenSSL is in enough products you will more than likely at least be downstream patching for years to come.
>aka the biggest rip-off in America.
No that would be giving these cable pigopolists regional monopolies without requiring common carrier. Crony capitalism for all to see (ie government picking winners). In Arizona these cable industry asshats actually had the balls to put one of their paid lobbists on the state corporation commission (regulator) and it took far longer than it should have for her to resign.
>Don't buy American is already a good principle.
Except the iPhone security is front and center as being pretty solid what with the Feds throwing a fit. Do you really think buying an Xiaomi android because its not American will make you safer (hint: Android full phone encryption tends to be garbage which is why Google backed off requiring it). Yes the US government sucks but they are incompetent enough to let the world know what they are up to unlike many other governments.
Keep thinking there is such a thing as a US company with over 100 employees. Said original company above probably does at least a billion dollar of business in the UK/EU and more than likely it was their subsidiary in the UK involved in the legal action. Also keep believing your legal system can't be bought. The US system is just more transparently corrupt to corporate interests.
Pretty rich using the term American to refer even to companies headquartered here considering most of them pay almost all their tax over there (EU). The UK readership I have noticed still insists on assigning nationalism to corporations. Guess many over there haven't went full multinational yet where they choose where and how much to pay tax and will sue your country if the laws hurt their shareholder value. Don't worry its coming.
Yep Java the concept was decent but SUN's absolute garbage implementation continued up to today really limited it's use on the desktop. Microsoft did a good job of showing how to do a managed language environment but then came to the conclusion that the concept was not fit for purpose for developing its own products (a few token examples aside which tended to be flaky and slow).