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Comment More spectrum? (Score 1) 152

Perhaps the FCC should allocate more license-free spectrum for this purpose? 2.4GHz was only available because it happened to be shared by microwave ovens, which made the band less usable due to all the interference. How about finding a few more slices of bandwidth to allocate now that everyone is using it? Preferably under 3GHz due to its better penetrative properties.

Comment Are they delusional? (Score 5, Insightful) 35

Why do governments think they can control the flow of security software and exploits over the Internet?

Bad guys already don't follow the laws, and will obtain and use them anyway.

Good guys testing security will probably obtain and use them anyway because the probability of actually getting caught and prosecuted for it are nearly nil if it's not being used in a crime.

In other words, these laws stop no one except maybe one or two goodie-two-shoes. What's the point?

Comment Kids should at least be familiar with coding. (Score 1) 306

I feel kids should at least be familiar with coding. Learning how computers execute instructions and do what they do is akin to learning about how oxygen combines with fuel in combustion in a science class, or how cells divide in a biology class.

They don't have to know extreme detail, just have a basic idea of how the world works. And in today's world that includes computers.

The language doesn't even matter. Even old-school BASIC is a good language to use for the class, because it's easy to understand and the results are instant. Just enter some lines and type RUN.

It's not like we have to each the kids all about complex APIs, GUI programming, networking and so on. Just teach them enough to get rid of the feeling that the computer is a "magic box" that they have no idea how it works.

Comment Another thing... (Score 0) 234

Another thing that baffles me. The article says the bill for the month was $15687. There are 1440 minutes in a month TOTAL. That's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week connected.

A simple division makes this work out to over $10 a minute. What kind of "long distance" call these days costs $10 a minute?

Something fishy is going on here.

Comment Re: SystemD added? (Score 4, Insightful) 494

A recent of example I had that made me dislike systemd was a prototype RHEL7 system here that has ZFS-on-Linux support installed on it.

When you boot it up, there's around a 50/50 chance whether the ZFS filesystems will be mounted after boot. This is an inconsistency that, as a long time sysadmin, REALLY BOTHERS ME.

Yes, I realize the root cause. ZFS has some dependency that is not starting before it. The dependency has to be declared in the appropriate service. However, with systemd we introduce the concept of "just because it came up correctly on this boot doesn't mean it will on the next one."

And that is supremely frustrating. What if it weren't 50/50? What if the likelyhood it didn't come up was 1/100? Suddenly a routine reboot becomes a debugging mission, and I reboot again and it works. "Eh, must have been a transient problem." No it wasn't.

With classic init you were fairly sure that the system's state was the same on every boot. Now it's a gamble. Good luck with that! This is why we're sticking with RHEL6 for the moment on production systems.

Comment Whitelisting executables... (Score 4, Insightful) 190

This actually sounds like a great idea. Whitelist all the executables on your system. Then, if something tries to execute that's not whitelisted, throw up a dialog explaining what's going on. This would catch sneaky attempts to execute trojans in a lot of cases.

One downside is it probably wouldn't work with interpreted languages, and those can be fairly powerful. But it's a start.

Comment How much is his investment in the company making? (Score 4, Interesting) 482

A lot of CEOs (a good example was Steve Jobs) will take token small salaries because most of their income is from their ownership in the company.

If he's pulling down $5 million a year from company stock dividends, is giving up a $1 million salary that big a deal?

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