I know a few people like you, who always buy the lowest-end junk because "they'll have to upgrade it soon anyway". It's a self-fulfilling prophecy; they constantly curse their lousy crap and spend more throwing it away and replacing it every 18 months than I spend on decent gear that lasts 6-8 years.
But you should never buy first generation bleeding edge stuff either. The iPad 1G sucked, because mobile phone parts were very poor five years ago. It wasn't 'planned obsolescence', Apple didn't go out of their way to put inferior parts into it, they put in what existed at the time. Now that tablets are a 'thing' and chip designers are seriously targeting them, much better stuff exists-- the current iPad has 8 times the RAM and 10-20x the CPU performance of your model. Software designers would have to cripple their apps/sites to support both the latest hardware and yours, and you're not a big enough market for them to care.
On the other hand, if you'd just waited a bit and got the iPad 2, it would still be supported. Hell, it would still be *sold*, four years after its first release, in the form of the iPad Mini.
Sorry to reply to myself, but after reading the full details on this vulnerability it's not like the previous Thunderbolt exploits I've seen, and my prior advice may not be sufficient protection.
It uses a string of vulnerabilities to flash itself into the firmware using Diagnostic Mode, which exists outside the protection of FileVault. To fully secure yourself you probably need to set a firmware password... not as easy as turning on FileVault, but it should only take a couple minutes on a modern Mac: instructions
Hopefully Apple will take steps to close the vulnerabilities but it's not likely to affect many people; it requires prolonged physical access to the machine, multiple reboots and connection of hardware, and finally the cooperation of the user (logging in again) for the attacker to steal any useful information. Virtually any machine could be compromised under the same circumstances.
And if you *don't* encrypt your hard drive or set a firmware password, it's not like anyone with physical access needs a fancy thunderbolt bootkit to compromise your PC.
It all comes down to economic efficiency. Manufacturing costs have plummeted while labor costs have skyrocketed, so it's not a productive use of one's time to repair. Time is expensive, stuff is cheap.
Repair isn't the only skill that's suffered; we've forgotten how to farm, forgotten how to weave our own clothing, forgotten how to do many things that were required of a household a century or two ago. It's also why we get connected halfway around the world for customer service and don't get our fuel pumped and windshield washed by a whistling attendant.
Whether this is ultimately good or bad depends on your point of view, but unless we run short of raw materials, drive up costs via pollution taxes, or see an economic meltdown in the west it's not likely to change course. Rising wages in China and other industrial companies will only do so much before factories switch to robot labor.
There's a big difference between allowing something and requiring it. I think OO was the natural evolution of concepts like interfaces and namespacing, but what sets it apart is that it insists (so far as it can) the developer encapsulate information, while procedural languages at best suggest it.
Of course it's possible to write clear code in any paradigm, and some of the most beautiful code I've ever seen has been purely procedural, but that is unfortunately the exception. Most code I read is pretty poor, and the worst OO code I've encountered is far ahead of the worst procedural code in terms of readability and maintainability. I'll take the kludginess of OO over the heroic measures it takes to keep a large C project from turning into an unintelligible mess.
OO isn't about anthropomorphism, it's about isolation and providing a clear API. If this was a large scale project with fifty people working on code that could move students, I don't want them implementing fifty different versions of move_student that will break whenever the Student or Classroom model changes.
I know it's trendy to hate on things that have been around a while, and OO indeed isn't the answer to everything, but it's still a useful way of keeping a complex program from getting out of control.
Sorry if that came off a bit harsh, but it should be fairly obvious that multifocal lenses are not suited for viewing objects at a fixed distance. Everyone I know with 'progressive' lenses dislikes them; they find them disorienting and only wear them because they want a single pair for all purposes and hate the look of bifocals.
Your eyes are not something to be trifled with; get a pair of proper conventional lenses that suit the distance you will be working at and save yourself the misery of 90% of your vision being out of focus all the time.
Android significantly less than 1GB? Hardly, unless you're managed to strip it to bare bones. iOS devices reserve about 3GB, and Surface tablets reserve 15-60GB (I kid you not) for Windows RT/8
Unfortunately the defects were in the chips they sourced from nVidia and to a lesser extent ATI/AMD, and there's little computer manufacturers could do to avoid it. It's true that Apple runs components fairly hot to reduce fan noise and that accelerated some failures, but the real culprit was the early attempts at lead-free solder companies were using to meet new RoHS standards.
Fixed a MBP's bad nVidia chip using a heat gun, an infrared thermometer, and a shield made of aluminum foil. I wouldn't recommend the oven approach unless you're desperate, since many parts are really not meant to go past 100C, much less the ~250C required for proper reflow.
Oh, and whatever you do, be sure to remove any plastic/rubber chips or standoffs first as they will most certainly melt, and reapply thermal paste afterwards (Apple and many OEMs are infamously bad with thermal paste, so this is a good idea whenever you crack open a laptop).
Because we're on an irreversible trajectory toward integrating technology with our cars and houses, bodies and brains. If we don't control the software, then at some point, we won't control parts of our homes and our selves.
Last time I checked, humans today can't easily tinker with their own bodies and brains, they have plenty of known bugs and vulnerabilities, and many methods of altering their function are heavily regulated if not illegal.
While I support the author's idealism, what do you think will happen in this cyborg future when software can be physically addictive or kill you or change your personality? People have always been willing to give up a certain amount of freedom for a certain amount of security, and they will continue to do so.
Good luck finding devices that get dim enough, though; manufacturers have focused on making screens brighter for daytime use at the expense of nighttime usability.
About the only devices I have that dim enough to tolerably use in a dark room are my Retina MBP and iPad, and even then I must use f.lux or light-on-dark color schemes to make it comfortable. I've tried screen filtering apps for Android, but they never seem to dim the soft keys and can cause unexpected battery drain.
Oh, and don't get me started on backlit keyboards.
Yeah, what's next? Case-insensitive email addresses and domain names?
Remember, the whole reason files have names and not sequences of random hex is for human legibility. For most applications, case sensitivity does not increase legibility.
Nothing like a reminder that you live in the future.
I know we've been talking about biomechatronics for decades, but Moore's Law and developments in nanomaterials are making things possible that were the stuff of science fiction just a few years ago. Simply put, we're starting to build amazingly large numbers of amazingly complex structures at amazingly small scales out of amazing materials, amazingly cheap.
Mind you, that's not new either; biology has been doing that for eons. Yet being able to manufacture it, to mass-produce biological or biocompatible materials like BCIs and prosthetic organs, is a remarkable and wholly new development. I fully expect the next half century will see a medical revolution that rivals the computer revolution of the last.
Slashdot Mirror
edit: the above was supposed to be a reply to another post by gstoddart in this thread. It doesn't make as much sense in this context, sorry
I know a few people like you, who always buy the lowest-end junk because "they'll have to upgrade it soon anyway". It's a self-fulfilling prophecy; they constantly curse their lousy crap and spend more throwing it away and replacing it every 18 months than I spend on decent gear that lasts 6-8 years.
But you should never buy first generation bleeding edge stuff either. The iPad 1G sucked, because mobile phone parts were very poor five years ago. It wasn't 'planned obsolescence', Apple didn't go out of their way to put inferior parts into it, they put in what existed at the time. Now that tablets are a 'thing' and chip designers are seriously targeting them, much better stuff exists-- the current iPad has 8 times the RAM and 10-20x the CPU performance of your model. Software designers would have to cripple their apps/sites to support both the latest hardware and yours, and you're not a big enough market for them to care.
On the other hand, if you'd just waited a bit and got the iPad 2, it would still be supported. Hell, it would still be *sold*, four years after its first release, in the form of the iPad Mini.
http://www.theguardian.com/com...
Then the attacker types cp -R / /Volumes/NSA\ Data\ VacuumTM/
Sorry to reply to myself, but after reading the full details on this vulnerability it's not like the previous Thunderbolt exploits I've seen, and my prior advice may not be sufficient protection.
It uses a string of vulnerabilities to flash itself into the firmware using Diagnostic Mode, which exists outside the protection of FileVault. To fully secure yourself you probably need to set a firmware password... not as easy as turning on FileVault, but it should only take a couple minutes on a modern Mac: instructions
Hopefully Apple will take steps to close the vulnerabilities but it's not likely to affect many people; it requires prolonged physical access to the machine, multiple reboots and connection of hardware, and finally the cooperation of the user (logging in again) for the attacker to steal any useful information. Virtually any machine could be compromised under the same circumstances.
During the Mac OOBE it prompts you to turn it on.
And if you *don't* encrypt your hard drive or set a firmware password, it's not like anyone with physical access needs a fancy thunderbolt bootkit to compromise your PC.
FileVault 2 disables DMA over FireWire/Thunderbolt when no user is logged in or the machine is locked.
If you want an extra layer of security, execute this command:
sudo pmset -a destroyfvkeyonstandby 1 hibernatemode 25
...and your Mac will erase its decryption key from RAM every time it goes to sleep.
It all comes down to economic efficiency. Manufacturing costs have plummeted while labor costs have skyrocketed, so it's not a productive use of one's time to repair. Time is expensive, stuff is cheap.
Repair isn't the only skill that's suffered; we've forgotten how to farm, forgotten how to weave our own clothing, forgotten how to do many things that were required of a household a century or two ago. It's also why we get connected halfway around the world for customer service and don't get our fuel pumped and windshield washed by a whistling attendant.
Whether this is ultimately good or bad depends on your point of view, but unless we run short of raw materials, drive up costs via pollution taxes, or see an economic meltdown in the west it's not likely to change course. Rising wages in China and other industrial companies will only do so much before factories switch to robot labor.
There's a big difference between allowing something and requiring it. I think OO was the natural evolution of concepts like interfaces and namespacing, but what sets it apart is that it insists (so far as it can) the developer encapsulate information, while procedural languages at best suggest it.
Of course it's possible to write clear code in any paradigm, and some of the most beautiful code I've ever seen has been purely procedural, but that is unfortunately the exception. Most code I read is pretty poor, and the worst OO code I've encountered is far ahead of the worst procedural code in terms of readability and maintainability. I'll take the kludginess of OO over the heroic measures it takes to keep a large C project from turning into an unintelligible mess.
OO isn't about anthropomorphism, it's about isolation and providing a clear API. If this was a large scale project with fifty people working on code that could move students, I don't want them implementing fifty different versions of move_student that will break whenever the Student or Classroom model changes.
I know it's trendy to hate on things that have been around a while, and OO indeed isn't the answer to everything, but it's still a useful way of keeping a complex program from getting out of control.
Sorry if that came off a bit harsh, but it should be fairly obvious that multifocal lenses are not suited for viewing objects at a fixed distance. Everyone I know with 'progressive' lenses dislikes them; they find them disorienting and only wear them because they want a single pair for all purposes and hate the look of bifocals.
Your eyes are not something to be trifled with; get a pair of proper conventional lenses that suit the distance you will be working at and save yourself the misery of 90% of your vision being out of focus all the time.
So you're asking us how to use the worst available tool for a task... better?
Android significantly less than 1GB? Hardly, unless you're managed to strip it to bare bones. iOS devices reserve about 3GB, and Surface tablets reserve 15-60GB (I kid you not) for Windows RT/8
They're just trying to remove crud from the web. Is that so wrong?
No, they definitely break.
sorry, clips not chips (autocorrect strikes again)
Unfortunately the defects were in the chips they sourced from nVidia and to a lesser extent ATI/AMD, and there's little computer manufacturers could do to avoid it. It's true that Apple runs components fairly hot to reduce fan noise and that accelerated some failures, but the real culprit was the early attempts at lead-free solder companies were using to meet new RoHS standards.
Fixed a MBP's bad nVidia chip using a heat gun, an infrared thermometer, and a shield made of aluminum foil. I wouldn't recommend the oven approach unless you're desperate, since many parts are really not meant to go past 100C, much less the ~250C required for proper reflow.
Oh, and whatever you do, be sure to remove any plastic/rubber chips or standoffs first as they will most certainly melt, and reapply thermal paste afterwards (Apple and many OEMs are infamously bad with thermal paste, so this is a good idea whenever you crack open a laptop).
I got in just long enough to see #lahar is trending.
The base iPad Mini 2 lists at $299 and was as low as $229 during recent sales; the N1 is launching at $249.
Because we're on an irreversible trajectory toward integrating technology with our cars and houses, bodies and brains. If we don't control the software, then at some point, we won't control parts of our homes and our selves.
Last time I checked, humans today can't easily tinker with their own bodies and brains, they have plenty of known bugs and vulnerabilities, and many methods of altering their function are heavily regulated if not illegal.
While I support the author's idealism, what do you think will happen in this cyborg future when software can be physically addictive or kill you or change your personality? People have always been willing to give up a certain amount of freedom for a certain amount of security, and they will continue to do so.
Good luck finding devices that get dim enough, though; manufacturers have focused on making screens brighter for daytime use at the expense of nighttime usability.
About the only devices I have that dim enough to tolerably use in a dark room are my Retina MBP and iPad, and even then I must use f.lux or light-on-dark color schemes to make it comfortable. I've tried screen filtering apps for Android, but they never seem to dim the soft keys and can cause unexpected battery drain.
Oh, and don't get me started on backlit keyboards.
Just get f.lux.
Yeah, what's next? Case-insensitive email addresses and domain names?
Remember, the whole reason files have names and not sequences of random hex is for human legibility. For most applications, case sensitivity does not increase legibility.
Nothing like a reminder that you live in the future.
I know we've been talking about biomechatronics for decades, but Moore's Law and developments in nanomaterials are making things possible that were the stuff of science fiction just a few years ago. Simply put, we're starting to build amazingly large numbers of amazingly complex structures at amazingly small scales out of amazing materials, amazingly cheap.
Mind you, that's not new either; biology has been doing that for eons. Yet being able to manufacture it, to mass-produce biological or biocompatible materials like BCIs and prosthetic organs, is a remarkable and wholly new development. I fully expect the next half century will see a medical revolution that rivals the computer revolution of the last.