Some educational tech is quite reasonably priced(the various FOSS CMSes are really priced to move); but you can pay ~$3,000 to kit out a 24 seat classroom with a set of IR clickers.
Mind you, these suckers are the lowest rung on the totem pole of clicker tech. Almost exactly the same IR setup found in a dollar store TV remote; but with device IDs to allow the receiver to distinguish multiple units.
At least the software is still a pile of unstable crap that takes ~60 seconds to start up on a reasonably modern C2D with a couple of gigs of RAM and crashes uncomfortably frequently...
The "doctors" analogy seems dangerously weak. In theory, when a new drug/surgery/device comes out, it has undergone an FDA approval process, which includes a bunch of safety and efficacy testing. The process is imperfect, and can be marred by relatively small sample sizes, or shenanigans on the part of companies who really want to sell new, shiny, patented stuff, rather than generic old stuff; but it theoretically provides a degree of assurance that newer offers at least some improvements, at least in some situations. Therefore, a doctor who isn't aware of the new stuff is pretty clearly inferior to one who is.
Educational technology, on the other hand, is required to undergo precisely no testing of any kind(aside from basic electrical safety and not catching fire type stuff), and frequently receives very little. The vendor is always terribly enthusiastic, of course, and there may or may not be a study or two of dubious quality; but the adoption is driven much more by optimism and hype than by data. Since there is pitifully little testing, the idea that newer=better is largely nonsense.
As TFA notes, certain technologies that are more or less unequivocally superior have been widely adopted by all but the most fossilized. CMSs beat the hell out of distributing photocopies and shuffling paper. They have largely replaced the distribution of photocopied stuff, with the common exception of the near-ceremonial "handing out of the syllabus on the first day". Similarly, computers are largely superior to typewriters for working with text, and both are more legible by far than handwriting, so most documents are now written on a computer(though, for markup/editing/grading, handwriting is still competitive).
If you are going to "require" something, you had better have good reason to believe that it is the better way to go.
Nothing, to the best of my knowledge, has been standardized(the encryption used to protect the inherently-vulnerable-to-nearby-eavesdropping wireless signals may be better or worse; but the carrier is treated as trusted).
On the plus side, now that quite powerful phones with general-purpose computer capabilities and fast data connections are available, there isn't anything stopping you from applying any of the technologies used by computers to protect data traveling over the public internet to your phone. You just won't be able to do so with anybody who hasn't set up something compatible.
I'm surprised that they would be using ammonia coolants, rather than something more exotic and less toxic.
Ammonia makes perfect sense in industrial ice plants and rink chillers and stuff, being dirt cheap, and not especially dangerous when you have an entire planet's atmosphere to dilute the leaks. Plus, it doesn't have the Ozone-eating properties of the CFCs.
In space, though, everything is expensive by default, having been carried into earth orbit, there isn't much of an ozone layer to worry about, and you really don't have enough breathable atmosphere available to risk contaminating it with anything unpleasant. Ammonia seems like a curious choice.
I suspect that synchronization is more important than licensing costs(particularly since a good software synth costs $$$$ while a FLAC decoder costs $0).
If you play a recording, the action on stage has to happen exactly as fast as it would have during the recorded session. If you have a synth being fed input from a camera tracking the conductor and/or scene changes from the guys in the lighting booth, your music will stay in time with your actors.
We've had automated systems capable of maintaining at least limited feedback relationships with their environments since the days when pneumatics were cutting edge.
This isn't somebody opening winamp and hitting "play". That would, indeed, be pathetically inadequate.
A system capable of, say, tracking a conductor would be just slightly above the tech level of the gaming peripheral that microsoft will be rolling out at $150 a pop in the near future. I'm sure a pro-level setup can do better right now(and, if need be, you can always cheat a bit. Nothing like making something IR reflective to make a machine vision system's life easier...)
I don't know whether synthesized musicians will cut it with live audiences or not; but keeping pace with some environmental stimuli is not going to be the limiting factor.
That is pretty much why TI is doing what they are doing. For any sort of outside-world use, their calculators have been glaringly less powerful than full computers, with appropriate software, for years. Now that properly programmable cellphones, with nice screens and so forth(not just your basic "tip calculator" dumbphone stuff) are becoming widely available, they are in the position of being inferior for the portable stuff as well(these cellphones aren't actually cheaper, but they are a sunk cost, since you already have them, and the software that makes them act as a calculator is markedly cheaper than the TI calculator).
All this makes TI's logical business plan very, very clear: cater to the demands of schools and standardized tests. A test administrator will absolutely flip out if you tried to pull a cellphone during a test(hardly unreasonable, if you can't actually read the screen at the time, using a calculator program is pretty much indistinguishable from texting questions and answers back and forth with an outside confederate). Therefore, TI is safe from cellphones in those markets. They are similarly unthreatened by laptops, PDAs, and the like.
This is why TI has focused on cranking out overpriced, but reasonably durable, fairly basic calculators(the capabilities of their low end have barely budged, even as computers as a whole have advanced, and their high end has actually withered considerably) and on doing everything they can to establish themselves as the standard in schools and textbooks and standardized tests. They cannot win elsewhere; but anything programmable enough to replace them cannot win there.
It suddenly turned out that wikileaks, the piratebay, and anybody affiliated with Falun Gong or the Dalai Llama were all "spammers, e-criminals, and speculators"...
Well, at least this is a standards-driven OSS-supported alternative to the existing DNS filtering schemes that definitively have never been used for nefarious purposes so far.
Are you thinking something sugary and hallmarkesque, like the PR that "administrative professional's day"(formerly for appreciation of secretaries, now renamed) gets, or something more along the lines of "We route your packets, we back-up your documents, we administer your databases, we install your drivers. We maintain your uptime while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us. "?
I was using a Latitude C840 thermal assembly, taken from a unit on the junk heap, for reference and I guess that I just couldn't stop all the old hatred flowing back...
A relic from the days when Intel was selling P4"m" as a suitable laptop processor, and laptop cooling systems were still relatively crude. In this case, the actual passive unit isn't bad(it actually has a certain aesthetic charm); but the two 30ish millimeter fans(one to buzz, one to whine) that labored to suck dust through the thing were horrors in their day.
I'd agree on the "stupid idea" part; but the hot side problem is relatively trivial.
Larger controllers(like serious joysticks) wouldn't even need to change external appearance much. Just make the feet a little taller, to allow a gap around the base for airflow, and shove a CPU cooler and fan on the side that isn't heat-sunk by the gamer.
Smaller items would be ugly(ie. protruding heatsinks, tiny fans whining away, drafts of hot air whistling through little plastic slits) if not done quite elegantly; but, again, totally doable. Consider the sorts of compact heatpipe based coolers used to keep 40ish watt laptop CPUs from dying. We are talking a fairly small, reasonably light, and not too annoying object.
Battery life, though, would be a killer. TECs love their amps, and would be brutal on batteries.
TECs can "switch sides" depending on the direction of current flow. They are horribly inefficient; but that(along with their small size and solid-stateness) is one of the things that makes them fun to play with.
Connect the DC source one way, and this is the cold side, connect it the other way, now that is the hot side. It's the reason that they are generally used in the cheezy little heater/cooler units you can get for in-car use.
Not that I know of; but the logistics could be tricky.
If you want the organs to be viable, the EMTs need to show up fast. Those guys don't have advanced life support gear(more advanced than the panicked bystanders, sure, less advanced than the hospital) so your organs will be deteriorating the whole time from gunshot to OR. They'll probably be deteriorating extra quickly because a decent gunshot wound(ie. the one you want in a suicide attempt), will cause massive blood loss, really fast. This is good for you, as it reduces the amount of time spent conscious of having a massive gunshot wound to a minimum, and reduces the odds that the EMTs will show up a little too early, and successfully patch you up. Having ALS and a horrible gunshot deformity would be a real downer, and you might score a psych stay as well...
Probably not impossible, with the right proximity and prep; but riskier and a lot messier than just getting the ethicists to heed your expressed wishes, have the doctors anesthetize you, remove the organs, and then deepen the anesthesia until you shut down.
TFA isn't exactly heavy on the details(PCWorld, detail light? Shocking.); but the class of vulnerability being described, a vulnerable remote management program listening to a modem(if the number isn't in the phone book, it is super-secret, right?), seems pretty OS agnostic. Same with the ghastly corner-cutting on making keys not unique per-device.
It is conceivable that fewer corners were cut back in the day, or that a substantially greater percentage of ATMs were on bank premises, not being connected over public phone lines; but it would be surprising if OS/2 alone would save you from those design mistakes.
Unless he chose the two he purchased purely based on underground buzz about their weakness(possible; but you'd hope that a security researcher would go for novelty.), going 2 for 2 suggests that overall industry standards might not be that high...
I assume that large purchasers, like banks, can easily enough commission "private label" versions of ATMs(based more or less closely on a manufacturer's available models, doing mechanical engineering much beyond the 'paste on a logo and some colored trim' level probably isn't cost effective; but running firmware tailored to them and their systems) that are for their exclusive order; but the generic ones you see in crummy convenience stores and the like are just appliances.
Because(like commercial scales, and gas pumps) they are appliances used in commerce, there may well be one or more state, or local authorities who want to take a look and put their sticker on it before it goes into use; but if some guy wants to buy a used one, I see no reason why that would be uncommon or controlled. If they are used for fraud or theft, that is just as illegal as any other flavor of the same; but there are loads of common and wholly legal tools that have potential in that area.
This is clearly just a slashvertisement for Microsoft's expansion of their "Cashback" promotion from Bing to WinCE "The Product that Needs it More Than Bing"...
On the other hand, if they don't kill it, the presenter may well have just committed a number of crimes in front of a live audience (and probably a fair few cameras)...
If they do, he'll just have some nastygrams to hang on his wall, and a story of being oppressed by the man, without any lingering consequences.
They might just be ignoring it entirely, figuring that the Streisand effect is not with them on this one; but the path of maximum vindictiveness actually requires them to let him go ahead...
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Some educational tech is quite reasonably priced(the various FOSS CMSes are really priced to move); but you can pay ~$3,000 to kit out a 24 seat classroom with a set of IR clickers.
Mind you, these suckers are the lowest rung on the totem pole of clicker tech. Almost exactly the same IR setup found in a dollar store TV remote; but with device IDs to allow the receiver to distinguish multiple units.
At least the software is still a pile of unstable crap that takes ~60 seconds to start up on a reasonably modern C2D with a couple of gigs of RAM and crashes uncomfortably frequently...
The "doctors" analogy seems dangerously weak. In theory, when a new drug/surgery/device comes out, it has undergone an FDA approval process, which includes a bunch of safety and efficacy testing. The process is imperfect, and can be marred by relatively small sample sizes, or shenanigans on the part of companies who really want to sell new, shiny, patented stuff, rather than generic old stuff; but it theoretically provides a degree of assurance that newer offers at least some improvements, at least in some situations. Therefore, a doctor who isn't aware of the new stuff is pretty clearly inferior to one who is.
Educational technology, on the other hand, is required to undergo precisely no testing of any kind(aside from basic electrical safety and not catching fire type stuff), and frequently receives very little. The vendor is always terribly enthusiastic, of course, and there may or may not be a study or two of dubious quality; but the adoption is driven much more by optimism and hype than by data. Since there is pitifully little testing, the idea that newer=better is largely nonsense.
As TFA notes, certain technologies that are more or less unequivocally superior have been widely adopted by all but the most fossilized. CMSs beat the hell out of distributing photocopies and shuffling paper. They have largely replaced the distribution of photocopied stuff, with the common exception of the near-ceremonial "handing out of the syllabus on the first day". Similarly, computers are largely superior to typewriters for working with text, and both are more legible by far than handwriting, so most documents are now written on a computer(though, for markup/editing/grading, handwriting is still competitive).
If you are going to "require" something, you had better have good reason to believe that it is the better way to go.
Nothing, to the best of my knowledge, has been standardized(the encryption used to protect the inherently-vulnerable-to-nearby-eavesdropping wireless signals may be better or worse; but the carrier is treated as trusted).
On the plus side, now that quite powerful phones with general-purpose computer capabilities and fast data connections are available, there isn't anything stopping you from applying any of the technologies used by computers to protect data traveling over the public internet to your phone. You just won't be able to do so with anybody who hasn't set up something compatible.
I'm surprised that they would be using ammonia coolants, rather than something more exotic and less toxic.
Ammonia makes perfect sense in industrial ice plants and rink chillers and stuff, being dirt cheap, and not especially dangerous when you have an entire planet's atmosphere to dilute the leaks. Plus, it doesn't have the Ozone-eating properties of the CFCs.
In space, though, everything is expensive by default, having been carried into earth orbit, there isn't much of an ozone layer to worry about, and you really don't have enough breathable atmosphere available to risk contaminating it with anything unpleasant. Ammonia seems like a curious choice.
Anybody know why they would have gone with that?
I suspect that synchronization is more important than licensing costs(particularly since a good software synth costs $$$$ while a FLAC decoder costs $0).
If you play a recording, the action on stage has to happen exactly as fast as it would have during the recorded session. If you have a synth being fed input from a camera tracking the conductor and/or scene changes from the guys in the lighting booth, your music will stay in time with your actors.
We've had automated systems capable of maintaining at least limited feedback relationships with their environments since the days when pneumatics were cutting edge.
This isn't somebody opening winamp and hitting "play". That would, indeed, be pathetically inadequate.
A system capable of, say, tracking a conductor would be just slightly above the tech level of the gaming peripheral that microsoft will be rolling out at $150 a pop in the near future. I'm sure a pro-level setup can do better right now(and, if need be, you can always cheat a bit. Nothing like making something IR reflective to make a machine vision system's life easier...)
I don't know whether synthesized musicians will cut it with live audiences or not; but keeping pace with some environmental stimuli is not going to be the limiting factor.
That is pretty much why TI is doing what they are doing. For any sort of outside-world use, their calculators have been glaringly less powerful than full computers, with appropriate software, for years. Now that properly programmable cellphones, with nice screens and so forth(not just your basic "tip calculator" dumbphone stuff) are becoming widely available, they are in the position of being inferior for the portable stuff as well(these cellphones aren't actually cheaper, but they are a sunk cost, since you already have them, and the software that makes them act as a calculator is markedly cheaper than the TI calculator).
All this makes TI's logical business plan very, very clear: cater to the demands of schools and standardized tests. A test administrator will absolutely flip out if you tried to pull a cellphone during a test(hardly unreasonable, if you can't actually read the screen at the time, using a calculator program is pretty much indistinguishable from texting questions and answers back and forth with an outside confederate). Therefore, TI is safe from cellphones in those markets. They are similarly unthreatened by laptops, PDAs, and the like.
This is why TI has focused on cranking out overpriced, but reasonably durable, fairly basic calculators(the capabilities of their low end have barely budged, even as computers as a whole have advanced, and their high end has actually withered considerably) and on doing everything they can to establish themselves as the standard in schools and textbooks and standardized tests. They cannot win elsewhere; but anything programmable enough to replace them cannot win there.
I don't know if there is a market; but I assume that there is because they already exist.
Your basic USB numeric keypad, for laptops that lack one, is a 5-10 dollar item(assuming you don't make the mistake of buying retail).
Full usb-connected calculators, like the Canon DK100i, are (coincidentally enough) selling for ~$20.
It suddenly turned out that wikileaks, the piratebay, and anybody affiliated with Falun Gong or the Dalai Llama were all "spammers, e-criminals, and speculators"...
Well, at least this is a standards-driven OSS-supported alternative to the existing DNS filtering schemes that definitively have never been used for nefarious purposes so far.
They were celebrating the DIY aesthetic of the true sysadmin. They'll sell you the beer; but you'll have to provide the empty bottles yourself...
Are you thinking something sugary and hallmarkesque, like the PR that "administrative professional's day"(formerly for appreciation of secretaries, now renamed) gets, or something more along the lines of "We route your packets, we back-up your documents, we administer your databases, we install your drivers. We maintain your uptime while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us. "?
I was using a Latitude C840 thermal assembly, taken from a unit on the junk heap, for reference and I guess that I just couldn't stop all the old hatred flowing back...
A relic from the days when Intel was selling P4"m" as a suitable laptop processor, and laptop cooling systems were still relatively crude. In this case, the actual passive unit isn't bad(it actually has a certain aesthetic charm); but the two 30ish millimeter fans(one to buzz, one to whine) that labored to suck dust through the thing were horrors in their day.
I'd agree on the "stupid idea" part; but the hot side problem is relatively trivial.
Larger controllers(like serious joysticks) wouldn't even need to change external appearance much. Just make the feet a little taller, to allow a gap around the base for airflow, and shove a CPU cooler and fan on the side that isn't heat-sunk by the gamer.
Smaller items would be ugly(ie. protruding heatsinks, tiny fans whining away, drafts of hot air whistling through little plastic slits) if not done quite elegantly; but, again, totally doable. Consider the sorts of compact heatpipe based coolers used to keep 40ish watt laptop CPUs from dying. We are talking a fairly small, reasonably light, and not too annoying object.
Battery life, though, would be a killer. TECs love their amps, and would be brutal on batteries.
TECs can "switch sides" depending on the direction of current flow. They are horribly inefficient; but that(along with their small size and solid-stateness) is one of the things that makes them fun to play with.
Connect the DC source one way, and this is the cold side, connect it the other way, now that is the hot side. It's the reason that they are generally used in the cheezy little heater/cooler units you can get for in-car use.
You are almost certainly thinking of "Journey to Wild Divine"...
A bit on the woo-tastic side(Deepak Chopra is usually a bad sign); but I certainly don't know of any other myst-like biofeedback games.
Someone has also hacked together an OSS driver for the biofeedback peripheral, in case you prefer stats to swamis.
Why are all the old jokes about IBM marketing flooding into my mind?
Umm, if you are a technician, your wages count as "cost"...
Not that I know of; but the logistics could be tricky.
If you want the organs to be viable, the EMTs need to show up fast. Those guys don't have advanced life support gear(more advanced than the panicked bystanders, sure, less advanced than the hospital) so your organs will be deteriorating the whole time from gunshot to OR. They'll probably be deteriorating extra quickly because a decent gunshot wound(ie. the one you want in a suicide attempt), will cause massive blood loss, really fast. This is good for you, as it reduces the amount of time spent conscious of having a massive gunshot wound to a minimum, and reduces the odds that the EMTs will show up a little too early, and successfully patch you up. Having ALS and a horrible gunshot deformity would be a real downer, and you might score a psych stay as well...
Probably not impossible, with the right proximity and prep; but riskier and a lot messier than just getting the ethicists to heed your expressed wishes, have the doctors anesthetize you, remove the organs, and then deepen the anesthesia until you shut down.
A good rootkit tries to blend in with its environment...
True enough. I suspect that that has to do with their use for sinful, wicked, dirty gambling, which tends to draw legislative fire.
Since the gambling in the financial sector tends to be concentrated well away from the retail level, I'd suspect that ATMs would be safe.
TFA isn't exactly heavy on the details(PCWorld, detail light? Shocking.); but the class of vulnerability being described, a vulnerable remote management program listening to a modem(if the number isn't in the phone book, it is super-secret, right?), seems pretty OS agnostic. Same with the ghastly corner-cutting on making keys not unique per-device.
It is conceivable that fewer corners were cut back in the day, or that a substantially greater percentage of ATMs were on bank premises, not being connected over public phone lines; but it would be surprising if OS/2 alone would save you from those design mistakes.
Unless he chose the two he purchased purely based on underground buzz about their weakness(possible; but you'd hope that a security researcher would go for novelty.), going 2 for 2 suggests that overall industry standards might not be that high...
I assume that large purchasers, like banks, can easily enough commission "private label" versions of ATMs(based more or less closely on a manufacturer's available models, doing mechanical engineering much beyond the 'paste on a logo and some colored trim' level probably isn't cost effective; but running firmware tailored to them and their systems) that are for their exclusive order; but the generic ones you see in crummy convenience stores and the like are just appliances.
Because(like commercial scales, and gas pumps) they are appliances used in commerce, there may well be one or more state, or local authorities who want to take a look and put their sticker on it before it goes into use; but if some guy wants to buy a used one, I see no reason why that would be uncommon or controlled. If they are used for fraud or theft, that is just as illegal as any other flavor of the same; but there are loads of common and wholly legal tools that have potential in that area.
This is clearly just a slashvertisement for Microsoft's expansion of their "Cashback" promotion from Bing to WinCE "The Product that Needs it More Than Bing"...
Editorial standards these days... I ask you...
On the other hand, if they don't kill it, the presenter may well have just committed a number of crimes in front of a live audience (and probably a fair few cameras)...
If they do, he'll just have some nastygrams to hang on his wall, and a story of being oppressed by the man, without any lingering consequences.
They might just be ignoring it entirely, figuring that the Streisand effect is not with them on this one; but the path of maximum vindictiveness actually requires them to let him go ahead...