I'm typing this on my windows 8 laptop right now. I will say that metro occasionally does something pretty but is largely useless. I usually get into it by accident and not by choice. I consider it kind of like the media center interface for windows 7. Something you might engage by accident and marvel at for a moment, then try your best to turn off (at least if you're using XBMC or some other media center replacement).

Reasons for using it: It really is faster than windows 7 at several tasks. Booting for one. My laptop has an EFI bios and I installed a solid state drive. It boots in 2 seconds. It also updates far less frequently than win7 and has to reboot less, but that may be just because they haven't found all the bugs yet.

Way to use it: Get classic shell and configure it to skip metro

Things I hate about it: The windows 7 search functionality is broken from the start button. I think this is a classic shell limitation. I believe if you actually use metro and type a search it will be like win7. Basically it doesn't properly search for programs and other things so if you're used to hitting windows key and begin typing name until completion happens, that doesn't work right.

I don't remember the term for it, but if you own a business it can be said that it makes a profit, but at the same time it loses money. The reason for this is it's not making enough money vs what an investor would get putting his money in a different investment. So let's say you're making your expenses plus 5%, the investor is mad because he might get a 6% interest rate if he loaned his money to someone else.

I suspect the same thing would apply to generating electricity specifically to mine bitcoins. You might find several more valuable things to invest your electricity in (or you might not, since the value of bitcoins fluctuate)

I haven't read the article so I'm not sure of the details, but you generally don't need to be able to read all the cards. Lots of cards are distinguishable from each other. An 8 for instance looks nothing like an Ace. A face card can easily be distinguished from a regular card. You could tell if the card was black or red even if you couldn't see the suite.

With Texas holdem and other community card games, it's easier to see the important details. Does he have a pair? Does he have a flush? A straight? An Ace or a face card? You could at least have some confidence of what they don't have.

I have a windows 7 box at home.. huge beast of a machine that I use to play games. I've got windows 8 on a laptop to experiment with. What I love so far about windows 8 is that it boots on my laptop in 2 seconds (with a solid state drive). That's from power-on to usable. Linux Mint came close to that speed but not quite.

The laptop is for taking meeting notes, reading email, taking on trips, etc.

My desktop at work is a Linux box. I fired ubuntu a few years back and went to straight debian. This wasn't as bad as it sounds, and with 3rd party repos for most of the big apps it never felt out of date. I occasionally would package things or repair packages if I wanted to deploy to servers or help with debian community stuff, or just wanted to make sure whatever it was installed cleanly.

Recently I upgraded the computer at work and decided to try ubuntu again, but while I was feeling experimental I decided to try KDE again too. I've been a gnome user for years because I wanted something unobtrusive that just worked. Like CDE on Solaris (most of the time, long ago).. slightly bloated but quick, something where terminal + firefox + thunderbird + pidgin just worked.

I hadn't used KDE since probably before KDE3 days.. so I hadn't given it a fair shake in a long time.. I'd given windows and MacOS X more of a shakedown than KDE, so it was only fair to try it again. It was hideously terribly ugly.

But everything I hated about it has become easily customizable via the menus, and the terminal feels like it's made for developers or power users. Everything has a power user tweak or a way to get rid of it, if you decide it's something you don't want. My last big gripe was I couldn't tell the dumb ATI driver which monitor was really primary so it always put my taskbar on an old 21" 4:3 I have turned sideways. I wanted it in my middle monitor where it's easy to navigate.

KDE lets you drag it to another monitor and put it wherever you want.

So, while it's pointless to ask slashdot for opinions on these things, I feel like I've tried all the OS's recently and Linux is mature enough to be a primary desktop OS for anyone, if that's what you want.

It doesn't need to be reliable enough to work 100%. At a certain accuracy level it could be enough to trigger secondary authentication.

I tend to walk away from my computer at work for trivial reasons, and I don't always lock the screen. So I started thinking about this a few years ago. I was thinking bluetooth triangulation might be good, but that could be defeated by leaving your keys on your desk or a few other means. So I thought "what if the computer could detect my keyboard rhythm to a certain level of confidence and lock the screen if it didn't think it was me.

Couple this with webcams and other things and you would have a pretty reliable method to stop casual snoopers and pranksters.

So how about this:

if Rhythm doesn't match:
Checks for proximity of bluetooth device
Turns on webcam to check for basic similarities
checks other computers you manage to see if you're actively using one of those

finally:
locks the screen

I think the future of radio transmission is moving away from "allocated frequencies" and towards direction sensing antennas, frequency hopping, error correction and traffic tagging. The reasons for this are multifold, but for starters having an agency say "nobody can use this frequency but Bob" doesn't stop Alice from using the frequency and crapflooding all over it. The law has provisions to stop Alice, but Bob is completely screwed while the law tracks down Alice and asks her to quit it.

Frequency hopping eases that for the source because it's much harder to jam. Interference still can happen but that's what the error correction is for, assuming non-intentional interference. Additionally, making the receive antenna directional makes an interfering source much harder to use because they've got to be on a similar angle to the receiver to screw things up.

In other words, the FCC is forcing people to keep up. First by telling TV stations to move, then by selling white space, now with this stuff. The slashdot post the other day about the UK looking to move radar out of 5Ghz and use passive radar is another example of changing the way radio is used. They aren't saying car makers can't use this, they're saying improve your systems to the point where everyone can use this without issue.

Of course it could still be about the money, since they originally sold the frequencies to automakers and now they're reselling it to wifi providers. I doubt auto makers are getting a refund.

It's not that simple. Insert one character anywhere and the password becomes loads harder to guess. Misspell a word if you want to add more entropy. 5t4pl3 isn't a good password because it's easy to check a wordlist with added leetspeek modifications. b4tt3ry5t4pl3, not so easy, nor is b4ttarystaple. It doesn't matter that it looks easy, the problem is the computer has to check every permutation of those two words, and it doesn't know you picked those words, or what order you put the words in. Or if you left the spaces between words. Imagine burning twenty years on permutations of 4 words only to find out there are spaces to consider?

The fact is that long passwords are better than ciphered short passwords. The longer the better. Sentences are much better than words because they have very little chance of being used before. If you're scared to try four words use six. Or nine. Use the phrase "If you're scared to try four words use six." You won't forget it.. you might have a little trouble typing it at times, but nobody will ever guess it.

The problem is that programmers for years have been saving memory, or whatever it is they thought they were doing, by restricting passwords to characters. Most of the time it wouldn't cost companies anything to allow 255 character passwords but they don't. So your security is limited by their dumb system and it doesn't matter how many dumb symbols you put in there, it won't be any harder to crack 8 characters.

It's not real security, it's security through obscurity. Specifically, it has two very large flaws and one nitpicky one. One is shared password, meaning everyone who is using a system has to use the same password (knock).

The second is that anyone listening on a remote network can listen to your knock sequence and they've defeated your barrier to entry, leaving you falling back to your true authentication which hopefully isn't as simple to break.

Client based port-knocking can be better about this, implementing rotating ports based on time (as long as the client and server's time is in sync), but at that point all you have is an elaborate firewall that's emulating spread-spectrum frequency hoping on wireless. You might as well program the client to continue hopping through the entire session, making it more difficult to reassemble the original data (but likely useless because anyone sniffing can modify their parameters to suit this new shenannigan and just order the packets by time.. again it would fall back to whatever encryption you were using under the obfuscation).

Also in that case you've required a custom client on the user side which makes the service harder to use.

The final nitpick is that you can't ever open that service up to the public because it then requires the public to know the port knock sequence. So it's unfeasible on port 80. If you leave any port open you might as well leave all of them open, since you have no idea if your next attack vector is going to be HTTP or SSH. It's better to just keep the box patched and use rate limits/host based IDS/firewalls than deal with the extra hoopla.

I knew enough about Tesla cars, or so I thought. I always figured they were impractical for me because their price puts them at a sole-car position for a person, and for long trips there was nothing that could be done about not being able to reach places > 300 miles away.

The scandal actually gave me a second or third look at them and let me see that the supercharger network is coming along. I also thought that the supercharger network was dumb, reasoning that I wouldn't want to wait 50 minutes to recharge my car in the middle of a trip. The article made me rethink that as well. On a drive of >300 miles I almost always stop somewhere for lunch. Basically the cars range just enforces a break every few hundred miles.. not that bad a thing.

There are still problems unspoken by this article. What if multiple cars are ahead of you and it takes 2 hours to charge? You can't really plan those delays into a trip, not a business one at least.

I'm still a big fan of the Chevy Volt for being 100% electric, with the backup gas engine if needed. And it doesn't look completely ridiculous like the nissan leaf, nor does it require new infrastructure like the Tesla.

There is no way to kill a bill with prejudice. No way to say "NO, and don't ever bring this up again!"

So the same congressman who was there last year and the year before keeps bringing up the same bill over and over again until it passes. It doesn't cost them anything to introduce a failed bit of legislation. If anything, it costs the less the second time around because they didn't have to retype it.

Everyone already acknowledges that nobody reads these things, they're hundreds of pages of nonsense most of the time, and everyone knows there is some pork thrown in there somewhere to fund someones pet project, since that's the only way they'll vote for it.

Eventually, the public gets tired of standing up for their rights and just goes home. They'll wear down the protestors enough to the point where they won't notice or care that it's been backdoored into the "stop children's recitals act" of 2014.

It's pretty bad even by slashdot standards:

'Let me elaborate on that for a second. When I say “bring down” an ethernet controller I mean BRING DOWN an ethernet controller.'

This statement is worse than useless, it's a waste of space and a waste of your time to read it (I'm sorry I quoted it). The next sentence is okay but then they go back to 'Literally the link lights on the switch and interface would go out. It was dead.'

Literally, this is a waste of the word literally. And it being dead was implied by everything stated above. The rest is informative but still in a conversational style that makes it hard to read, and it's lacking in details such as:

What model of Ethernet controller was tested. What Firmware version are they using? Has the problem been reported to Intel?

We beat Comcast to the punch by about a year. I'm happy that they turned it on and can afford to support it, but 90% of the customers you have are dumb and don't care why it doesn't work from your ISP, they just care that it works at Starbucks and doesn't work at their house.

Being a huge monopoly has an advantage when it comes to telling customers to pack it up when they have DNS issues. I too am a comcast customer and I run my own resolver (for flexibility, not because they implemented DNSSEC)

All the domains that didn't work at the time were government sites. Usually obscure subdomains that only individual customers needed access to, so hounding random government agency to fix their problems didn't really help the rest of your customers. Also, contact with random government agency admin, which isn't easy to begin with, might be impossible if their admin contact has an MX within the broken DNSSEC domain (or we're forced to use non-DNSSEC enabled resolvers for our own email servers to contact them)

It broke access to several DNSSEC enabled websites that were misconfigured. After a few months of support problems where we suggested the websites fix their issues and they ignored it, it was requested by management that we turn it off.

It's a very bad design as it stands now. It's unable to return any error but NX Domain for DNSSEC errors for reasons of backword compatibility, which is stupid since you need a DNSSEC enabled resolver to make the request.

It also has an incredibly steep learning curve that even experienced public key administrators face problems with.

In a world not controlled by giant oligarchy phone companies you can "buy" a car from a dealership, take it home and paint it purple.

You can do the same to your house because even though you owe 99% of it's value to the bank it belongs to you.

For some reason, the same thing isn't true for a $500 phone. Why can't I buy a phone from T-mobile with a 2 year contract, take it home and immediately switch it to AT&T but continue paying T-mobile for the phone for 2 years?

My favorite thing about autocomplete is all the times I've typed something in the box I didn't mean to, or pasted something when the wrong thing was in my paste buffer. The autocomplete logs have got to be a goldmine of private individual data, and confidential corporate data.