So that means that no Tivo will be able to record the HD channels off of Dish or DirecTV.
None of the normal TiVo boxes will record HD from DirecTV, but the HR10-250 can record HD from DirecTV.
Until they converted many of their channels to MPEG-4 only, it really was a perfect "it just works" device, and is still light-years ahead of the new DirecTV branded DVRs in terms of reliablity and features (and still does a better job with OTA HD than MythTV).
There is supposed to be a new version that supports the MPEG-4 channels coming soon...hopefully it won't be too expensive, because the TiVo UI and reliability really is worth it.
1. updates that frequently fail to install: My friend's laptop constantly complains about needing ~44 critical updates, but any attempt to install them results in an instant "44 updates failed to install". On my laptop, luckily, most updates installed, but I always had 2 or 3 that wouldn't.
And neither I nor anyone I know has ever had it happen.
Then, you don't work with enough Windows computers.
Generally, this issue is caused by lack of disk space, although a corrupt updater database could also result in the same thing.
To solve it, you stop the "Automatic Updates" service, then delete all the files and subdirectories of "C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download" and start the update service again. If the problem persists, stop the service and delete all the file and subdirectories in "C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution".
The last resort is to stop the update service, configure it to "Notify but not download", then manually apply updates one at a time from the Microsoft Update website. This way, if one of the updates is causing the whole update procedure to die, you can figure that out and at least get everything else installed.
You don't really need/home to be fast (although velociraptor drives and RAID are nice)
Although there are a few usage scenarios where the 300GB Velociraptor is still the clear winner, the 2TB Caviar Black generally does better in most real-world situations.
When you factor in the $0.80/GB vs. $0.14/GB, the 2TB Caviar Black is the clear price/performance winner for rotating magnetic disks.
Though most of them are now listed in the "%ABV(#Proof) format. Kind of sad, since it shows that some people are too stupid to realize that proof is just ABV/2.
Don't forget too that if every scalped ticket isn't sold, that comes off of the bottom line.
If a scalper was looking to maximize their income and minimize the risk of having leftover stock, they would sell the tickets using a Dutch or reverse auction (or some variation of either).
If the original ticket sellers (Ticketmaster, etc.) would do this, then there would be no scalpers, and no mad rush to get tickets in the first few minutes. I think a good starting price would be ten times the "normal" ticket price for each type of seat, with the bottom price being about 50% of "normal" (but have this price only available for a few days before the event). A little tweaking on this model would maximize revenue for the actual event and completely cut scalpers out of the equation.
Coax to VCR and from VCR to TV. Set VCR to record channel 32, press TV/VCR button and then use the TV as you would.
This comes nowhere close to what TiVo does.
TiVo was the first consumer device that would let you start watching a recording before the recording finished. It was also likely the first consumer device that allowed you to watch a finished recording while another recording was in progress. This is what the TiVo patents mostly cover, and although I don't agree that you should be able to patent software, the software/hardware combination that TiVo sold is worthy of a patent.
Without several VCRs, lots of tape juggling, and careful planning, you can't come close to what TiVo does. I know, because I used to have 4 VCRs, and on bad nights, three of them were active at the same time.
With a well-designed multi-tasking system and cache, you're probably right (although 50ms is 1/20 of a second, not half a second), although with hard disk seek times of 10-15ms (for real-world average hard drives), 50ms might be a low estimate.
But the experience that people had with Vista SuperFetch is that it thrashed the disk constantly (which it shouldn't...once RAM is loaded, the disk should idle), and seemed to do stupid things like write out pages to the page file in favor of loading that RAM with "predictive cache". You can see how this would really slow things down.
But, even without this, a "predictive" cache should still put more weight to recently used pages from the active application, especially if there hasn't been any change of foreground app in a while (which is likely with a game). This would result in a user experience which is better by being more responsive, even if it's only skipping a few delays of 100ms.
The IOC could still get their advertising revenues, and even direct-charge viewers. These seem like blindingly obvious ideas.
Why haven't they done this yet?
Because NBC handed them a truckload of money for "exclusive rights".
Basically, instead working a little harder and trying to make the experience better for the viewers, the IOC took the easy way out and said "let NBC handle it...we've got our money".
Then, NBC is an idiot and believes that if they time delay events and keep all viewing to the NBC prime time hours, they'll make the most money. Again, it's the easy way, because setting up lots of streaming and trying to make money off it can be tricky. After all, it's not like NBC has billions of dollars to spend to hire the right people who can do the job.
This is not RAM memory you need, use or have purpose for. IF you do need it, it is zeroed-out and free'd to application in like 30ms (one frame in usual FPS games).
The reason that SuperFetch in Vista degraded performance is that it was too agressive about keeping memory filled.
For example, when the game you are playing asks for more memory (to load a video between levels, for example), Vista did give up the cache fairly quickly, but as soon as the game released the memory, Vista started reading more stuff from the hard drive to fill that memory back up. 99% of the time, what it was reading wasn't the right thing. So, when then game went to load the next level and again asked for some temporary extra memory, Vista would have to stop filling the cache, zero out the memory, and seek the hard disk to the right place.
Basically, there's nothing wrong with a smart, unobtrusive prefetch algorithm that fills up RAM as cache. SuperFetch on Vista was neither smart nor unobtrusive. Hopefully, the Windows 7 implementation is a lot better.
And one more thing.. what's the big deal about teaching people hexadecimal? What's the purpose? I can do it, but I've never once thought of a reason I'd want to.
Although nowadays most debuggers will translate for you within a running program, if you are looking at data (like a hex dump of file), knowing how to translate from hexadecimal gives you a small boost which can help you tell right from wrong by eye.
I tend to look at a lot of output from tcpdump, and although there are good decoders for the basic packet, the data within still has to be decoded by hand most of the time, since it's not worth it to write a decoder when often the data is proprietary and changes format often.
If you want to memory map a file, you actually map it into the page file and read it from there.
Unless this has changed drastically in Vista or 7, this isn't exactly how it works.
When you memory map a file, it does do so by making it part of the paging system, but it doesn't copy the contents to the system paging file. In essence, the Windows kernel merely adds the memory mapped file to the list of current paging files on the system,..it's just private to anything that has the file memory mapped.
The OP is just not that smart in thinking Verizon is just laying out the cash w/o any compensation by the US Government.
No, I know all about the tons of money all the telcos and cable companies got for doing nothing.
And yet, only Verizon has managed offer a guaranteed speed of at least 5Mbps for less than $50/month.
So, I don't really care where Verizon got the money, since the only thing every other company is using the money for is to pay out bonuses to CxO's who leave the company.
How many machines can you reimage in a day? Even if you only do one at a time, I imagine you could do 4 or 5 in a working day.
It shouldn't take more than 30 minutes to re-image a machine, unless the image is far larger than it really should be.
With a DL DVD-R, you can store about a 15GB image (using compression) along with the bootloader and imaging software. Pop in the disc, boot up and maybe click a few wizard "Next >" buttons.
While one tech starts re-imaging, another can burn extra copies of the imaging DVD-R if there aren't enough to do the job quickly. Then, just hand disks to every employee as they come in and let them re-image their own machine. OK, so that's a little silly, but with 10 or so copies of the disk, it should be possible to re-image over 150 computers a day, even for just one tech. By the 2nd day, you should be up to 30-40 copies of the image DVD-R, and so the whole job shouldn't take more than 3 working days. So, three techs on a 24-hour shift should have you up and running again on 800 machines.
You must have a pretty small site if all of your data is contained within the.vmdk files and you can restore an entire datacenter (from bare metal) in 3-4 hours (including OS install time).
If you use any of the various wizards that create an install script based on your actual VM host config, you can usually re-install a host in less than 10 minutes.
Then, if you have a good backup of the actual running config of the host (i.e., the VM database, the virtual disk files, etc.), it's just a matter of getting the data to where it belongs.
For most, the biggest issue would definitely be acquistion of the hardware (the hosts, all the network hardware, SAN, etc.), which would generally take a lot longer than the re-install time.
Older programmers will typically not repeat the same naive mistakes again.
No, we keep coming up with new and exciting (and exponentially more expensive) mistakes.
Seriously, my old mistakes meant the code wouldn't compile or would flame out quickly in testing. Now, the mistakes are more subtle and more likely to be caused by some unexpected interaction of multiple parts of the entire system.
OTOH, I did spend about 10 minutes yesterday debugging a "dead" NIC that I had plugged into the wrong switch port (different VLAN).
I love your optimism, but I want you to try something: get a router that's not brand-new and relatively expensive, and put the "100Mb" WAN port on your LAN, put a machine on the LAN side, and copy data through it from something on your actual network. Not to say technology is standing still; we will have this soon enough. A $1400 Cisco router is only rated to 40Mb of WAN speed.
Although your test is accurate in general (most "home" routers can't handle more than about 25Mbps), you can get far more than 40Mbps for far less than $1400. Cisco is the Bose of the networking industry.
I've benchmarked some $300 Netgear router/firewall boxes at over 50Mbps both in and out at the same time. Since these boxes are rated at 60Mbps, I suspect that the $500 Netgear equipment rated at 127Mbps will have no problem hitting 80-90Mbps. As a router only (without NAT), I'd expect to see even better, as I can hit 80Mbps on commodity hardware using Windows RRAS
If I read you correctly, that's 20Mbps up and down (symmetric speeds) for 26 Euros... approx $36. Wow we're getting shafted here in the US.
It's seriously a matter of where you are. If you are in an area served by Verizon FiOS, you can pay very little for a lot of speed (25/25 is $65/month for residential customers with DHCP).
I pay $109/month for 25/15 with 5 static IPs on business FiOS (which gives you a decent SLA). Verizon doesn't oversubscribe FiOS, and I consistently get around 27/16 on the various speed test sites.
There was no governement mandate for Verizon to do this, and Verizon spent a boatload of money laying all the fiber. Other companies could do the same thing. I see this FCC proposal as a way to force them to get off their asses and try to catch up to Verizon, who have 50/20 service right now for every FiOS customer, and are testing 80/50 in a few places.
So I installed the kindle app on a windows vm at home, and synced it to the current book that I was reading.
30 minutes later, I had one hell of a headache. No thanks.
I suspect that most of the time, this sort of issue is caused by the fact that most LCD monitors are fairly low quality. It's very much a case of "you get what you pay for".
The iPad should have had a dual screen with both e-Ink and LCD, but at least the LCD is an IPS panel.
I don't know if having the UPS connected to the physical host via USB (especially if using one of the light hosts like an ESX VMware environment) is going to be enough to help him out.
I don't use USB, but I do connect the UPS to my ESX servers using a serial cable...it works great.
I use Network UPS Tools to automate the shutdown. One 1500VA UPS with 28Ah worth of batteries per two hosts gives me about 15 minutes of power.
Actually, I can stretch my imagination a bit... WGA is required to get security updates, thus it's a critical security patch because without it, you can't get the critical security patches.
None of my machines have WGA installed and all do just fine getting every security patch.
I use WSUS and have told it to decline the WGA update. It still downloads everything else, and all my machine get their patches off it.
Likewise, I built a machine for my sister that goes straight to update.microsoft.com, and still works with no WGA installed.
WGA isn't required for anything, although there are a few downloads from Microsoft where you need to run a similar authentication before they allow you to do the download. I also believe that XP64 never even attempts to download WGA as an update.
It requires physical modification of the chip itself, every time. The chips are sealed in epoxy, so you'd have to get thru that with acid EVERY TIME. You aren't going to automate it with improved knowledge.
Today, it requires physical access. but it might be that there is something flawed with the hardware algorithms that can be exploited via software once the inner workings of those algorithms are known.
It's like any bad encryption...it might appear good at first, but then some small break allows a general solution that allows decryption of any message. CSS is the classic example. The first cracks were caused by getting keys from a software DVD player, but after that, the algorithm became understood and it became possible to design a brute-force decryption that took only a few seconds to verify.
This should cut the "arrive before departure" time down to 30 minutes or less.
This is really only an issue with some airports (or during really busy flying days).
I regularly arrive at BWI about 60 minutes before my flight and end up sitting in the gate waiting area for about 15 minutes (since boarding is generally 30 minutes before the scheduled departure). Security takes less than 15 minutes from the time I walk up to the end of the line until I am completely through.
By far the biggest time wasters in "flying" are the sitting in the plane on the ground and the inability of airlines and passengers to figure out the fastest way on and off a plane. I used to complain about how long it took to get the baggage off the plane, but now that it takes nearly a minute per row to exit the plane, it's often already waiting by the time you get there.
So...you had to wait quite long anyway. Long enough that you decided to do something else in the meantime, because there's no way you would simply wait for the result
He didn't have to wait, or leave. He could have continued to use the computer and barely noticed that 5 cores were being used.
When I was stress-testing my i7 machine, I used Prime95 (as many people do). Prime95 has a poor interface for this sort of testing in that clicking the close box doesn't stop the app, but rather minimizes it to the tray. This is good for the "real" use of Prime95 (finding large primes), but not so much when you are wanting to check out the way the system responds with and without load.
Anyway, I accidentally left Prime95 running 4 tasks all day while I did other things, and only finally noticed the icon in the tray about 5 hours later. Sometimes, you really do want to run so many programs at the same time that you need 4 cores plus hyperthreading.
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So that means that no Tivo will be able to record the HD channels off of Dish or DirecTV.
None of the normal TiVo boxes will record HD from DirecTV, but the HR10-250 can record HD from DirecTV.
Until they converted many of their channels to MPEG-4 only, it really was a perfect "it just works" device, and is still light-years ahead of the new DirecTV branded DVRs in terms of reliablity and features (and still does a better job with OTA HD than MythTV).
There is supposed to be a new version that supports the MPEG-4 channels coming soon...hopefully it won't be too expensive, because the TiVo UI and reliability really is worth it.
1. updates that frequently fail to install: My friend's laptop constantly complains about needing ~44 critical updates, but any attempt to install them results in an instant "44 updates failed to install". On my laptop, luckily, most updates installed, but I always had 2 or 3 that wouldn't.
And neither I nor anyone I know has ever had it happen.
Then, you don't work with enough Windows computers.
Generally, this issue is caused by lack of disk space, although a corrupt updater database could also result in the same thing.
To solve it, you stop the "Automatic Updates" service, then delete all the files and subdirectories of "C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download" and start the update service again. If the problem persists, stop the service and delete all the file and subdirectories in "C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution".
The last resort is to stop the update service, configure it to "Notify but not download", then manually apply updates one at a time from the Microsoft Update website. This way, if one of the updates is causing the whole update procedure to die, you can figure that out and at least get everything else installed.
You don't really need /home to be fast (although velociraptor drives and RAID are nice)
Although there are a few usage scenarios where the 300GB Velociraptor is still the clear winner, the 2TB Caviar Black generally does better in most real-world situations.
When you factor in the $0.80/GB vs. $0.14/GB, the 2TB Caviar Black is the clear price/performance winner for rotating magnetic disks.
Though most of them are now listed in the "%ABV(#Proof) format. Kind of sad, since it shows that some people are too stupid to realize that proof is just ABV/2.
Irony, thy name is "Omestes".
Proof = ABV * 2, not ABV / 2.
Don't forget too that if every scalped ticket isn't sold, that comes off of the bottom line.
If a scalper was looking to maximize their income and minimize the risk of having leftover stock, they would sell the tickets using a Dutch or reverse auction (or some variation of either).
If the original ticket sellers (Ticketmaster, etc.) would do this, then there would be no scalpers, and no mad rush to get tickets in the first few minutes. I think a good starting price would be ten times the "normal" ticket price for each type of seat, with the bottom price being about 50% of "normal" (but have this price only available for a few days before the event). A little tweaking on this model would maximize revenue for the actual event and completely cut scalpers out of the equation.
Coax to VCR and from VCR to TV. Set VCR to record channel 32, press TV/VCR button and then use the TV as you would.
This comes nowhere close to what TiVo does.
TiVo was the first consumer device that would let you start watching a recording before the recording finished. It was also likely the first consumer device that allowed you to watch a finished recording while another recording was in progress. This is what the TiVo patents mostly cover, and although I don't agree that you should be able to patent software, the software/hardware combination that TiVo sold is worthy of a patent.
Without several VCRs, lots of tape juggling, and careful planning, you can't come close to what TiVo does. I know, because I used to have 4 VCRs, and on bad nights, three of them were active at the same time.
This would account for maybe 50ms of time.
With a well-designed multi-tasking system and cache, you're probably right (although 50ms is 1/20 of a second, not half a second), although with hard disk seek times of 10-15ms (for real-world average hard drives), 50ms might be a low estimate.
But the experience that people had with Vista SuperFetch is that it thrashed the disk constantly (which it shouldn't...once RAM is loaded, the disk should idle), and seemed to do stupid things like write out pages to the page file in favor of loading that RAM with "predictive cache". You can see how this would really slow things down.
But, even without this, a "predictive" cache should still put more weight to recently used pages from the active application, especially if there hasn't been any change of foreground app in a while (which is likely with a game). This would result in a user experience which is better by being more responsive, even if it's only skipping a few delays of 100ms.
The IOC could still get their advertising revenues, and even direct-charge viewers. These seem like blindingly obvious ideas.
Why haven't they done this yet?
Because NBC handed them a truckload of money for "exclusive rights".
Basically, instead working a little harder and trying to make the experience better for the viewers, the IOC took the easy way out and said "let NBC handle it...we've got our money".
Then, NBC is an idiot and believes that if they time delay events and keep all viewing to the NBC prime time hours, they'll make the most money. Again, it's the easy way, because setting up lots of streaming and trying to make money off it can be tricky. After all, it's not like NBC has billions of dollars to spend to hire the right people who can do the job.
2 to the 9'th is 256, so most random sequences would not have had 9 sequential results in a row.
In a world where 2^9 = 256, absolutely anything can happen.
This is not RAM memory you need, use or have purpose for. IF you do need it, it is zeroed-out and free'd to application in like 30ms (one frame in usual FPS games).
The reason that SuperFetch in Vista degraded performance is that it was too agressive about keeping memory filled.
For example, when the game you are playing asks for more memory (to load a video between levels, for example), Vista did give up the cache fairly quickly, but as soon as the game released the memory, Vista started reading more stuff from the hard drive to fill that memory back up. 99% of the time, what it was reading wasn't the right thing. So, when then game went to load the next level and again asked for some temporary extra memory, Vista would have to stop filling the cache, zero out the memory, and seek the hard disk to the right place.
Basically, there's nothing wrong with a smart, unobtrusive prefetch algorithm that fills up RAM as cache. SuperFetch on Vista was neither smart nor unobtrusive. Hopefully, the Windows 7 implementation is a lot better.
And one more thing.. what's the big deal about teaching people hexadecimal? What's the purpose? I can do it, but I've never once thought of a reason I'd want to.
Although nowadays most debuggers will translate for you within a running program, if you are looking at data (like a hex dump of file), knowing how to translate from hexadecimal gives you a small boost which can help you tell right from wrong by eye.
I tend to look at a lot of output from tcpdump, and although there are good decoders for the basic packet, the data within still has to be decoded by hand most of the time, since it's not worth it to write a decoder when often the data is proprietary and changes format often.
If you want to memory map a file, you actually map it into the page file and read it from there.
Unless this has changed drastically in Vista or 7, this isn't exactly how it works.
When you memory map a file, it does do so by making it part of the paging system, but it doesn't copy the contents to the system paging file. In essence, the Windows kernel merely adds the memory mapped file to the list of current paging files on the system,..it's just private to anything that has the file memory mapped.
The OP is just not that smart in thinking Verizon is just laying out the cash w/o any compensation by the US Government.
No, I know all about the tons of money all the telcos and cable companies got for doing nothing.
And yet, only Verizon has managed offer a guaranteed speed of at least 5Mbps for less than $50/month.
So, I don't really care where Verizon got the money, since the only thing every other company is using the money for is to pay out bonuses to CxO's who leave the company.
How many machines can you reimage in a day? Even if you only do one at a time, I imagine you could do 4 or 5 in a working day.
It shouldn't take more than 30 minutes to re-image a machine, unless the image is far larger than it really should be.
With a DL DVD-R, you can store about a 15GB image (using compression) along with the bootloader and imaging software. Pop in the disc, boot up and maybe click a few wizard "Next >" buttons.
While one tech starts re-imaging, another can burn extra copies of the imaging DVD-R if there aren't enough to do the job quickly. Then, just hand disks to every employee as they come in and let them re-image their own machine. OK, so that's a little silly, but with 10 or so copies of the disk, it should be possible to re-image over 150 computers a day, even for just one tech. By the 2nd day, you should be up to 30-40 copies of the image DVD-R, and so the whole job shouldn't take more than 3 working days. So, three techs on a 24-hour shift should have you up and running again on 800 machines.
This all assumes no attempt at data recovery.
You must have a pretty small site if all of your data is contained within the .vmdk files and you can restore an entire datacenter (from bare metal) in 3-4 hours (including OS install time).
If you use any of the various wizards that create an install script based on your actual VM host config, you can usually re-install a host in less than 10 minutes.
Then, if you have a good backup of the actual running config of the host (i.e., the VM database, the virtual disk files, etc.), it's just a matter of getting the data to where it belongs.
For most, the biggest issue would definitely be acquistion of the hardware (the hosts, all the network hardware, SAN, etc.), which would generally take a lot longer than the re-install time.
Older programmers will typically not repeat the same naive mistakes again.
No, we keep coming up with new and exciting (and exponentially more expensive) mistakes.
Seriously, my old mistakes meant the code wouldn't compile or would flame out quickly in testing. Now, the mistakes are more subtle and more likely to be caused by some unexpected interaction of multiple parts of the entire system.
OTOH, I did spend about 10 minutes yesterday debugging a "dead" NIC that I had plugged into the wrong switch port (different VLAN).
I love your optimism, but I want you to try something: get a router that's not brand-new and relatively expensive, and put the "100Mb" WAN port on your LAN, put a machine on the LAN side, and copy data through it from something on your actual network. Not to say technology is standing still; we will have this soon enough. A $1400 Cisco router is only rated to 40Mb of WAN speed.
Although your test is accurate in general (most "home" routers can't handle more than about 25Mbps), you can get far more than 40Mbps for far less than $1400. Cisco is the Bose of the networking industry.
I've benchmarked some $300 Netgear router/firewall boxes at over 50Mbps both in and out at the same time. Since these boxes are rated at 60Mbps, I suspect that the $500 Netgear equipment rated at 127Mbps will have no problem hitting 80-90Mbps. As a router only (without NAT), I'd expect to see even better, as I can hit 80Mbps on commodity hardware using Windows RRAS
If I read you correctly, that's 20Mbps up and down (symmetric speeds) for 26 Euros... approx $36. Wow we're getting shafted here in the US.
It's seriously a matter of where you are. If you are in an area served by Verizon FiOS, you can pay very little for a lot of speed (25/25 is $65/month for residential customers with DHCP).
I pay $109/month for 25/15 with 5 static IPs on business FiOS (which gives you a decent SLA). Verizon doesn't oversubscribe FiOS, and I consistently get around 27/16 on the various speed test sites.
There was no governement mandate for Verizon to do this, and Verizon spent a boatload of money laying all the fiber. Other companies could do the same thing. I see this FCC proposal as a way to force them to get off their asses and try to catch up to Verizon, who have 50/20 service right now for every FiOS customer, and are testing 80/50 in a few places.
So I installed the kindle app on a windows vm at home, and synced it to the current book that I was reading. 30 minutes later, I had one hell of a headache. No thanks.
I suspect that most of the time, this sort of issue is caused by the fact that most LCD monitors are fairly low quality. It's very much a case of "you get what you pay for".
The iPad should have had a dual screen with both e-Ink and LCD, but at least the LCD is an IPS panel.
I don't know if having the UPS connected to the physical host via USB (especially if using one of the light hosts like an ESX VMware environment) is going to be enough to help him out.
I don't use USB, but I do connect the UPS to my ESX servers using a serial cable...it works great.
I use Network UPS Tools to automate the shutdown. One 1500VA UPS with 28Ah worth of batteries per two hosts gives me about 15 minutes of power.
Actually, I can stretch my imagination a bit... WGA is required to get security updates, thus it's a critical security patch because without it, you can't get the critical security patches.
None of my machines have WGA installed and all do just fine getting every security patch.
I use WSUS and have told it to decline the WGA update. It still downloads everything else, and all my machine get their patches off it.
Likewise, I built a machine for my sister that goes straight to update.microsoft.com, and still works with no WGA installed.
WGA isn't required for anything, although there are a few downloads from Microsoft where you need to run a similar authentication before they allow you to do the download. I also believe that XP64 never even attempts to download WGA as an update.
It requires physical modification of the chip itself, every time. The chips are sealed in epoxy, so you'd have to get thru that with acid EVERY TIME. You aren't going to automate it with improved knowledge.
Today, it requires physical access. but it might be that there is something flawed with the hardware algorithms that can be exploited via software once the inner workings of those algorithms are known.
It's like any bad encryption...it might appear good at first, but then some small break allows a general solution that allows decryption of any message. CSS is the classic example. The first cracks were caused by getting keys from a software DVD player, but after that, the algorithm became understood and it became possible to design a brute-force decryption that took only a few seconds to verify.
You can pay a $530 up front and save $480 equalling $50 or pay $180 up front and then another $480 over two years equalling $660.
Your math is wrong, since you are subtracting $480 from one scenario and adding $480 to the other.
You either subtract $480 from one or add $480 to the other, but not both.
This post has the correct math.
This should cut the "arrive before departure" time down to 30 minutes or less.
This is really only an issue with some airports (or during really busy flying days).
I regularly arrive at BWI about 60 minutes before my flight and end up sitting in the gate waiting area for about 15 minutes (since boarding is generally 30 minutes before the scheduled departure). Security takes less than 15 minutes from the time I walk up to the end of the line until I am completely through.
By far the biggest time wasters in "flying" are the sitting in the plane on the ground and the inability of airlines and passengers to figure out the fastest way on and off a plane. I used to complain about how long it took to get the baggage off the plane, but now that it takes nearly a minute per row to exit the plane, it's often already waiting by the time you get there.
So...you had to wait quite long anyway. Long enough that you decided to do something else in the meantime, because there's no way you would simply wait for the result
He didn't have to wait, or leave. He could have continued to use the computer and barely noticed that 5 cores were being used.
When I was stress-testing my i7 machine, I used Prime95 (as many people do). Prime95 has a poor interface for this sort of testing in that clicking the close box doesn't stop the app, but rather minimizes it to the tray. This is good for the "real" use of Prime95 (finding large primes), but not so much when you are wanting to check out the way the system responds with and without load.
Anyway, I accidentally left Prime95 running 4 tasks all day while I did other things, and only finally noticed the icon in the tray about 5 hours later. Sometimes, you really do want to run so many programs at the same time that you need 4 cores plus hyperthreading.