Encryption is not about making it impossible to decode (in some cases, hash functions actually do try to do that), it is more about making it not worth the effort or making the effort so high that once you DO decrypt it the information isn't really that useful.

It is kind of like trying to to hunt through a haystack for a few small items only you have to jump through 200 proverbial hoops before you even get to look for one single item that may require four other items in a different haystacks before it means anything. Given enough time and the right knowledge you are correct, any encryption can and will be broken, but tell people that do cryptography that it was pointless for the Zodiac killer to encrypt his/her second cipher and they might give you funny looks.

Actually, yes it is an encryption method, just a one way encryption method.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Nail on the head. I can definitely see a lot of uses just within my circle of friends/activities if I could host a private cloud that I manage. There are some pretty awesome things I can do for myself, but for a even mid level deployment of 50 users, I don't have the bandwidth. I also would bet the open source groups and privacy groups would push to get some out of the box tools and setup for this to help push things out of big corp hands.

I disagree with that article on the single point of multi-tasking. Right now, I have a 24 mbps connection from AT&T and for single tasks, yes it is pretty much plenty for me for general use (once I have my home server up this will NOT be the case though). The thing is if I could turn on all the things I want to at once, I could easily saturate 300 to 400 mbps half the day right now.

There are tons of services, background downloads, personal applications, and so on that I just turn on and off depending on what I am doing. When working on any websites, I have to turn some other stuff off so that I can access pages, upload files, etc. but with a 1 gbps connection I would not give one single damn what-so-ever. On top of that the many things I would like to implement and host from home I could run all the time (various game servers, home web hosting, file hosting for myself, client-server applications, documentation and my own personal "cloud" services, the list is kind of massive now that I think about it) without worrying about destroying everyone else's connection at my house. I mean I do like the idea of cloud hosting for instance, but not when someone else is the host and with that kind of connection I can be the host.

Now, I will definitely give you that I am probably in the very small minority of people that could/would do this sort of thing, but that is the main advantage (right now) of 1 gbps connections. Beyond that expandability comes to mind since so many things are transitioning to run over internet connections. My TV and phone both run through the same line but are limited by necessity right now since things are run to me over such lower bandwidth connections. Considering many places want to completely get rid of POTS lines and most of your TV services are going to a vastly improved digital distribution service, high bandwidth connection are going to become much more useful in the future (not *necessary* for a while simply because it is going to take forever for this to roll out to rural areas due to the ROI being so much smaller for that kind of deployment).

If it isn't cost prohibitive to the consumer, bring on the increased bandwidth I say, can't wait until they roll it out to my area.

Better in some troops than others actually. Personally I don't care about a person's sexual orientation, child or adult, but some of the ultra conservatives that they organization attracts do. Surprisingly though even some of the more conservative types in our troop are fairly tolerant (they suspected several of the boys were actually gay well before the parent organization changed their stance, and didn't care to even report it).

Call it stealing, call it fraud, call it whatever the hell you like (unless it is in a court of law, then you kind of have to get the term right), passing off someone else's work as your own is wrong and generally some form of crime (civil or criminal).

A lot of it seems to be liability for large groups. An IT department can outsource data backups and data security to "the cloud provider" and if something goes bad they only get a bit into trouble for picking the wrong provider. Meanwhile they can just point the finger at their provider and say "not our fault."

Individuals on the other hand just want their damn data, but so few are even educated on IT security at all. I know so many software developers and IT workers even that don't know the first thing about security. Meanwhile my home server I'm implementing drive level encryption on a hardware RAID 5 with physical locks going on the tower (setup isn't done, still have to modify it) with the BIOS completely locked down to where you can't do anything unless you know the BIOS password or the Windows Server Admin password.

Yea, it is probably way over the top for me, but I would rather know that any data I put on there is reasonably secure as opposed to just raising hell with some provider that did god knows what with that data before they lost it.

While I am all for equality, some of it just plan doesn't make sense. Men and women are biologically different and if we blanket apply "equal" across the board to everything you just end up with something that really inconveniences both genders. In a situation of race/religion/etc., this really doesn't affect the majority of what a person is physically comfortable with (and I don't mean as in in men or women are physically superior to the other gender, I mean as in men and women are flat out designed differently) doing. This can be applied in other areas too, the sad part is the amount of red tape we have to apply to even get close to this "good sense" approach because of the few bad people that want to exploit the system or have no notion of where to draw the line.

You know, reading through this thread people bring up plenty of points about gender discrimination, does that apply here etc. What surprises me is the fact that so many people are not bringing up the fact that this in general is idiotic because we don't have anywhere near enough software engineers to be worrying about their gender. I mean, I guess I shouldn't complain too much because it creates a better job market for me (less competition, employers more willing to compensate me much better, plenty of side work if I want it etc.), but it just seems silly to push that much for females in CS when the field just needs more people regardless of gender...

Um, what the hell are you talking about? I've done work with a Boy Scout troop for over a decade and it has been the way it is for some time.

A Boy Scout Troop is all males under the age of 18, no females. A Venture Crew, which can be related to a troop under their same sponsoring organization, have males and females up to 21. Adult leaders can be both male and female so as to avoid discriminating against say single parent households where the child only has his mother (arguably this is even more beneficial to these groups, "arguably"). There is no "pitched a fit" and now girls can be in the actual troop. Girls can only be in Venture Crews which are related to a Scout Troop, but managed differently, follow different activity guidelines normally (though some overlap, such as Philmont), and have completely different progression paths and requirements.

Seriously not trying to be a prick here, but please don't post things when you only have misleading information.

It half ass works. I mean if you need REAL security, you're right, no way in hell I would trust my files to the built in windows encryption (other than maybe BitLocker drive encrypting, but that is an entirely different mechanism). I do find it funny/interesting/depressing the "security culture" that is now marketed to the general populace. They basically throw buzzwords at them until people believe they know what they're talking about.

The data access architecture will get overly complicated using any kind of flat storage like that with a web app. Asynchronous access to flat storage becomes very complicated and only has an advantage over even a weakly structured DB if your scale is >1000 data points really.

I wrote an application that used flat storage back in college and when even as few as 2 or 3 different access points had to be accommodated for data writing I had to modify a lot of logic just to keep data from becoming corrupt. There was a bit of a performance advantage to doing it, which is why I never went with an actual SQL database, but it was only because of the very small data volume.

SQLite or MongoDB sound like good options for this kind of need, especially because they can be transitioned into much more robust platforms fairly easily. Hell doing some XML structure embedded within the columns could probably help with a lot of the expandibility needed in the structure, but there are just too many headaches in using flat file storage imho.

Yea I definitely wouldn't use NoSQL or any kind of flat file data storage for that amount of data. If you're rather averse to having a large complicated DB, SQLite is probably a good starting point especially because if you find you do need to scale up to a more robust platform it converts very easily. If you expect it to scale up quickly (hitting in the 6 figure range or higher for data points) look at your standard mySQL and other related flavors imho. MongoDB I have heard very good things about (don't have any first hand experience unfortunately, I work with mostly MS SQL, Oracle SQL and mySQL since I do enterprise level work).

And you are 100% allowed to do that and entitled to have your own opinion, but you assume the risks with doing this. Begrudging them because they are making a move that really isn't unethical and is a good move for their company both financially and technologically is just silly. For the work I do on the side I have to provide licenses and such myself, and sometimes that involves spending a lot of money to get the new stuff that I need to be working on. Upgrade cost is part of it and MS has made it very clear when end of life would be for the OS. People have to make decisions and plan accordingly, but anyone raising hell is being just as selfish as Microsoft (not saying you in particular are 'raising hell' to that degree, but some people definitely are going too far).

I work at a mid-size company doing professional software development for some pretty damn large clients. I have a handle on the financials too, because I have to give them input for cost estimates on development time, support, etc. MS does have to handle support calls (I know, I've made them to them before, and we are not some massive client paying for privileges), security analysis of reported bugs, and "patch some bullshit" etc. Do you actually realize how fucking complicated Windows is under the hood? Millions of lines of code written in low level languages. I've watched 4 senior software engineers try to debug 1000 line communication module written in C spend a week on it and still not completely solve the problem. This is not "patch some bullshit" people want and if you seriously think their sales and marketing departments are not breathing down their necks you haven't done shit for professional programming at anything other than programmer. Work as a software lead for more than a year and yea, every company has those departments breathing down their neck any time something happens.

You can think whatever you want, bottom line is MS, no matter what you think of them, should not be obligated to support a twelve year old OS or start sending out their freaking source code to people that do. There are other reasons beyond "money grab" at play, but you clearly don't care to look at that anyway, so no use wasting my time there. Boiling an action down to some singular reason does not make a good point or argument.