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Comment Re:An important feature for me (Score 4, Insightful) 215

The way X11 does forwarding is very handy and useful, and I make use of it fairly often. But as usual, there's more than one proverbial way to skin the proverbial cat.

X11 forwarding is great for high speed and low latency connections such as a lan. Using it on anything else is asking for trouble, because if you lose your connection, you lose your app. Perhaps an improvement can be made to X11 forwarding in the new path forward (wayland) to make it more like screen where you can attach and detach to a running X11 app from a networked endpoint.

Remote desktop using RDP is superior to X11 forwarding for lossy connections because once the screen is loaded, very minimal draw/drag/etc communications are sent between the server and client for updates, X11 is far more data intensive for screen updates. And of course if you lose your connection (which I frequently do, trying to RDP from my cell phone), you'll get your apps back when you reconnect.

Having both X11 forwarding and RDP is a great choice, and I hope something similar to my aforementioned improvement makes it into the app.

Comment Re:not that great for home servers anymore (Score 1) 245

FreeBSD has the one killer feature for me: ZFS. It's portable in a pinch and ensure a decent amount of data integrity.

In theory.

In practice, a normal RAID10/RAID1 array is more reliable ...

I went through the same thing. I waited until freebsd 8 to try zfs after watching some videos about how awesome it was. I had been running multi TB storage arrays on lvm + raid1 on linux for years and decided to try and switch to ZFS. The lack of an fsck really shows when you get data corruption issues while resizing a pool. ZFS also lacks the capability of downsizing a pool, so when the upsize fails half way, you're fairly fscked. The recovery tools are just immature compared to even things like ext3. Trying to recover from the failed ZFS upsize involved raw disk editing to change uuids to try and move back to using an old drive that had good data.

I got the ZFS array working enough to pull off the new data and move back to an lvm append + raid1 setup. I've had failed lvm moves and failed lvm upsizes but the recovery is so easy because all the metadata about the array (and plenty of automatic backups) are stored in plain conf files. Ah the beauty of simplicity.

And speaking of bleeding edge, I've been playing with btrfs for some non-critical stuff and I've been very impressed. Much moreso than with ZFS.

Comment Re:Verizon is #1 in dropped calls (Score 1) 375

Not only the simultaneous connections (due to orthogonal signaling) but also due to its longer range and higher capacity in general. GSM being TDMA has a strict limit of 20 per tower and bandwidth usage is far less efficient.

Haha, what are you smoking? TDMA is a method of communication, just like HTTP is a communication method (albeit a higher layer), and has nothing to do with speed.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=tdma

Comment Re:Khan Academy (Score 1) 701

Versus my Chemistry class in Middle School...

Two weeks into the semester the teacher did something to amuse everyone by causing a reaction and capturing hydrogen in a beaker and then lighting it to get a little explosion. After that, it was more often than not: sit down, manually copy pages x-y from your text book, discuss last night's homework, learn 10 minutes of new things, then talk about this night's homework. No intelligent discussions about how this stuff is used in real world, just "learn this stuff from the book, it will be on your test, thanks for playing"

Comment Re:Go even futher (Score 1) 151

Ah yes, of course.

Speaking of SUVs... my business partner has a nice new land rover with built in gps-nav. It creates insanity to no end that I, as a passenger, cannot operate the gps while the car is in motion. The insanity!

Very often when driving I'll get a tech support call and I'll stop, have my brother take over the driving (we do lots of stuff together) and I'll work on my tethered laptop to work. I have a feeling that very many people across the country, from techies to kids of soccor moms would go batshit insane and probably become violent if all cell use while in a car-in-motion was automatically fined. Either that or it would become basically a tax and cost-of-doing-business. I wonder if it would be tax-deductible.

Comment Re:The actual damages... (Score 2) 647

Here's the issue... shoddy morality grounds or not, people en mass (all around the world too, not just the US) are not respecting copyright law.

Alcohol was illegal in the 20s... Did that stop everyone? It's legal now, isn't it? Legal issue became a moral issue.

Like it or not, as time goes on I think file sharing is going to follow the same path as prohibition. More and more kids are being brought up with getting payware for free. This is especially happening because many of the napster generation now have their own kids who think downloading music/movies/games/etc is perfectly okay (or they "know it's wrong", but do it anyway because morally they are okay with it, like say.... jaywalking).

In general, when millions upon millions of people are breaking the law every day, it seems to me that there's something wrong with the law.

Here's the crazy thing... I run a software company which survives by customers paying for the software of course. Would I be pissed if someone was running a copy they got for free? Yeah... I would be if it was a company using it for-profit. If it was some kid in a basement... eh, that's okay with me.

For me, morally it's a really tricky issue. Reading about grandmas, teenagers, and college students getting sued for hundreds of thousands over downloading an album or two makes me cringe. Reading about companies getting shut down for selling knockoff software or hardware makes me happy. There's a line somewhere where it all makes sense but it's not well defined.

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