See office password protection. The encryption of Excel version before 2007 was laughably weak. The last such file I had to crack took minutes. And that's still what you get if you use the older file formats.

The encryption starting with Office 2007 is as strong as your password. It's still possible to break weak ones, but you need to apply a fair amount of brute force. Here's a typical cracking program. The way it advertises support for multiple cores and GPU acceleration is a clue it's not trivial to crack.

But the question was how to compute the range of addresses it allows. Knowing the subnet mask isn't enough to do that. You also need to know the rules for what numbers you can't use in each subnet block. Not even all the calculators out there get this right. The first hit I got back from searching for one didn't; here's one that does. For the example here, "Usable IPs = 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.254".

The history of automatic fail-over software says that when you add some, in addition to the old issues you now have bugs in the fail-over software as a new problem.

I work on nothing but open-source based PostgreSQL servers for living, effecively competing against EnterpriseDB. All of the Oracle migrations I've done convert their PL/SQL code to PostgreSQL's PL/pgSQL instead. There's always some amount of application and process refactoring when you're moving to another database; this gets wrapped into that. I do a few training classes each year on the quirks of PL/pgSQL, and most companies don't do anything so complicated in there that they can't move things over.

It's often not even the biggest single migration hurdle, and despite their marketing claims EnterpriseDB doesn't help at all with the rest of them. The ugliest single conversion I've been involved in was an app where some developer loved CONNECT BY statements. My company at the time had to write a whole QA suite to make sure the replacements for those queries gave the same results in Postgres as the Oracle version.

DACs that re-clocked were popular in the late 90's. Then the falling prices of computer hardware eventually made buffering inexpensive enough to use instead. The original interface for CD transports to DACs came out in 1983. Parts of that design were based on what was economically feasible in consumer electronics then.

A lot of high-end audio gear aims toward a simpler is better design ideal, which is what excludes switching power supplies. My main concerns are with longevity. I have amplifiers here going back to the 60's that are still functional and serviceable. I haven't seen any switching power supplies that I think I'll be able to repair usefully decades from now.

There are two things called jitter here. When you're ripping a CD, sometimes audio reads will not give you the same block on the disc each time you ask for it. Older ripping programs had to read multiple times to correct that. Newer drives support "Accurate Stream", which makes this sort of jitter go away altogether.

CD transports do not have this problem. CD read jitter only happens if you're trying to read audio CDs at the block level, something they weren't really designed to do. A regular CD player will not do this.

The second type is transport clock jitter. The digital interface between CD transports and DACs doesn't have a separate clock. It's derived from the data itself. That process wasn't always perfect. In the mid 90's, the recovered clock was sloppy enough that bad ones were audible. Stereophile did a useful article measuring cd transport jitter during that era.

Nowadays the clocks and clock recovery circuits are so much better, I'm skeptical this is a real issue anymore. And most computer audio players buffer their data and then generate their own clock, which completely eliminates transport jitter.

[gsmith@thing1 ~]$ ping thing2

2015 is actually the year of Linux on the hoverboard.

No, that only happens when people are protesting now.

Are you sure about that?

You haven't lived until you've poured a PBR into some Fruity Pebbles.

My description of that map slice was bad. I meant to highlight the EU members that are packed together tightly, which the map did, because those so often are used as the examples I don't think are useful comparison points. My text did not match the map though.

The FCC is the Federal Communications Commission. They can't set rules for the entire country if they are unreasonable for some of the states to follow. That's why I was highlighting that the capabilities of the worst states end up being a limiter for whatever rules they can put in place. They can't say "broadband means X in most states, but because telcos in Alaska can't deliver that they can ignore this rule". That's also loads of evidence that if left alone, telcos will just offer good service in the dense areas, and forget about the rural ones altogether. That's exactly what's happened here with mobile phone coverage, several fiber projects, and before that things like DSL Interent connections. So instead everyone gangs up on them and tries to negotiate for everyone at once.

In theory individual states could raise the requirements above those set at the federal level. Unfortunately, the monopoly problems just get worse there. When there's only one provider actually giving service to an area, states have to legitimately worry about them just pulling out of the state altogether if they're pressed too hard. They can't walk away from a federal negotiation like that.

According to sources like this, about 85% of Sweden's population is in urban areas. When you only have 15% of the population that's really spread out, of course it's easy to just spend the extra money to wire all of them up. The population of Sweden is so small, you really can't extrapolate out from it very much to US sized problems either. You could barely fill the NY metro area here with everyone in Sweden.

And our sparse states make Northern Sweden look like a huge party. Nationwide US policy has to consider what's feasible in states like Montana and Wyoming, at 2.7 and 2.3 people per sq km. And then there's Alaska at 0.5...a single state that is also 4X as big as Sweden, too.

There's a similar pattern with all sorts of infrastructure people in tiny countries point out are missing in America. The Amtrak trains here operate one profitable line: the one that goes from DC through NYC then to Boston. That's the one chunk of the US where the urban density is similar to the EU.

But all our trains are still an overpriced mess, because the company's agreement with our government has them operating all these less urban lines that just burn money like mad.

No, the main reason European countries have better Internet access is due to their small size and layout. Sweden is roughly the size of California. If the US was a country that small, it would be easy to get fiber to everywhere. First speed test result I found averaged just over the state puts California at 39MB/s down and 9MB/s up. And that's without nearly as much taxation to support the whole thing as EU countries too.

But the FCC has to set policies that cover the middle of nowhere USA as well. Why do you think Verizon already gave up on laying more FIOS fiber? Because they already got all the interesting urban areas. No one can cost justify fiber to the middle of the US. You could lose all of the continental Europe in that wasteland and not even notice it.