But the reason I bring it up is that people say, "well I can just record it off my FM radio," without realizing that this is coming. The RIAA has already been talking about controls on digital radio to prevent people from doing that stuff there too.
They can talk about it all they want. Digital radio has been a SPECTACULAR failure everywhere it has been tried. The public doesn't want it, and broadcasters don't want it. Nobody wants to pay for it, nobody wants to risk losing any stations or any listeners, etc.
Analog radio is quite safe for at least the next decade.
I don't want to listen to the shitty selection most stations play, especially considering that they only play singles and never any of the other tracks on an album.
You've been listening to Clear Channel stations far too much... Find an independant radio station on the dial, and you'll find they don't have some automated list of the lowest-common-denominator songs, repeated 15 times every single day.
Also - due to on-chip memory controllers in AMD cpus, north bridges are basically absent on socket754/socket939 mobos which helps reduce overall power consumption / heat build-up in your computer case.
Helps? HELPS???
Northbridges were well on their way to SURPASSING the CPU as the most power-hungry chip in a computer. I had an Asus motherboard with a KT600 chipset, that was drawing ~45watts! to support my ~70watt CPU. How insane is that!
I have repeatedly contacted Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, VIA, SIS, and NVidia, requesting any power consumption figures they were willing to provide, and NONE of them gave any reply. I guess very few people ever picked up on that problem, because I still haven't seen motherboard power specs ever listed by any companies or review sites.
Although CnQ (Cool and Quiet) has completely reversed the situation, 32-bit Athlons did deserve their reputations for being hot.
When it was P3 vs Athlon, the Athlons were clearly much hotter, although they did have better performance. When it came to P4 vs Athlon, the situation got more complex.
Although Pentium 4s have a peak heat/power rating higher than any Athlon, AMD made a huge mistake with the Athlons, and make their chips unable to idle when recieving a HLT, unless the northbridge was disconnected, requiring motherboards to be more advanced, and causing a great deal of problems. So, practically no motherboards included S2K Bus Disconnect support, as it is called, until quite recently. The point being that AMD cpus would only vary perhaps 5watt from idle to max load (staying right at that 76w mark) whereas an idle Pentium 3/4 would drop down to a tiny fraction of its maximum power when not maxed-out.
What's more, motherboards that implimented S2K support did a pretty crappy job of it, in order to prevent any possible hardware problems. So while a Pentium 4 system can drop down below 50% of it's max power draw when idle, I haven't yet seen an Athlon system that could do so.
As I said, CnQ has completely reversed this, not only FINALLY giving AMD decent power management, but also putting them far, far ahead of Intel (and VIA) now. My point is simply that comparing only their "thermal design power" numbers is very, very misleading.
And how realistic is that a human driver can do an absolutely perfect job?
ABS would have to be perfect, a human would not. A human can decide each time how much or how little skid is acceptable. ABS has no way to do so. To be superior in all situations, it would have to do just that, or do a perfect job apply brake pressure. A human also knows exactly what tires are on the car, how well they grip, how wet the road is, the weight distribution of the vehicle, etc. All kinds of things an ABS knows nothing about, that significantly affects braking.
Whas that your impression, or did you actually measure the stopping distance?
We are not talking about tiny distances that you even need to mark-off... Most ABSs seriously increase braking distance, at higher speeds. Try braking at 70MPH, and you'll see a difference of more than a car-length between ABS and standard brakes.
The very fact that ABS pulses, rather than applying a certain level of consistent pressure, should tell you that it's not a precise method at all.
I suspect the percentage of people able to brake better than an ABS is well under 1%, which probably excludes you too.
You can "suspect" all you want, but you obviously have no experience in the area, and no idea what you are talking about. Just try to find a couple people with real knowledge and experience with brake systems, that say a notable number of ABSs give you shorter stoping distances than even a moderately skilled driver with standard brakes. You won't because, as I said from the very beginning, THAT ISN'T WHAT ABS WAS DESIGNED TO DO. It was designed to help drivers maintain steering during panic stops, not to reduce stoping distances. It technically has that potential as well, but the equipment advanced enough to do so in standard vehicles is a long way off.
In fact, I think we'll see regenerative braking entirely replace antilock brakes before ABSs get to that point, which can (fairly easily) provide far superior braking than ABS.
The fact of the matter is spyware is a _user_ problem. If _users_ continue to click "next next next" and don't understand what they are installing, spyware will be a major part of the future.
Nope and nope.
Spyware does silently install itself thanks to Internet Explorer vulnerabilities, without the users clicking anything.
Even on my Windows test system, which I barely use, I've found myself to end-up with spyware... There are several programs out there that include spyware, but do not make any mention of it in their EULA. And once you get one spyware program installed, it will likely download and install others on it's own.
Spyware can not be prevented, even by the eternally vigilant, unless you have practically nothing installed on your computer. Sure, the people with 40 different "search bars" are probably not reading the EULAs, but even in that case, antivirus programs should remove it. Just because it's vaguely mentioned in an EULA doesn't make viruses legal.
If this is an intentional backdoor, it is the crappiest one, EVER!
You'd want something in the base system of ALL Windows version, which couldn't be disabled AT ALL, doesn't require a user to be logged-in as an admin, or stupid enough to open anything sent to them.
If I was making a backdoor, I'd put it in something basic... Have the IP stack open a port when recieving a specially-crafted packet. Have the filesystem driver silently execute a file if it find a special signature in it (eg. code embedded in a cookie/web-page), etc.
Isn't this the same Steve Gibson that was freaking out about how Raw Sockets in XP were going to destroy the world a couple of years ago?
That's not even the good part... The good part is that he was insisting that ADMIN accounts not get raw sockets, but it was fine for SYS...
I feel sorry for the poor sap at Microsoft that got the job of trying to explain to GRC that his plan doesn't make any sense. That concept still hasn't sunk-in, through his tinfoil hat...
Antilock will help you stop faster, because if you lock the wheels you'll skid, and if you skid your stopping distance will increase.
No. That's only true if ABSs do an absolutely PERFECT job, which is realistically impossible... Even the NTHSB admits that ABS increasing braking distances on dry/wet asphalt. Even if ABS was tuned incredibly well (which is quite the opposite of all my experience) a human who knows how to brake properly, in a car without ABS, will still have the advantage.
I can tell you from experience that disabling ABS (on numerous cars) results in much better braking distances.
The point is that locking your tires up is a laughably inefficient means of stopping compared to applying braking pressure at the threshold of adhesion of the tires.
That's fine, in theory, but this isn't a discussion on the theoretical braking. Comparing the braking ability of actual ABS systems to non-ABS systems is much more complex.
The coefficient of friction between your brake pads and brake rotors is generally higher than the coefficient of friction between your tires and the road surface.
Sorry, but that doesn't prove anything at all, unless you are also insisting that all ABSs are perfectly configured to match the maximum that your tires can handle... which doesn't even pass the laugh test.
Why? if you don't have ABS, you'll just slam in the car in front of you at a higher speed. Don't think you can brake as hard as an ABS. You can't in any normal road condition (dry or wet asphalt).
You sound confused. ABS isn't power-assisted braking, it's antilock braking. That means it limits the ammount of force you can exert on the brakes to keep the wheels from locking, for one reason: so you can steer while you are standing on the brake pedal. It is to prevent you from sliding sideways, and in no-way helps you stop more quickly. That's particularly true on dry asphalt.
95 to 35 without skidding. Without loss of control. Without going sideways into the next lane, or the central barrier. Without hitting the idiot in front. In just over 2 seconds.
Actually, that says a lot more about the improvements in tires, brakes, decreasing vehicle weight, (presumably) popularity of front-wheel drive, etc., than it does about ABS.
The fact that your anecdotal experience didn't result in an accident, doesn't change the fact that ABS increases braking distances, when you need your brakes the most.
How is this any different than me sending someone in the UK a file, encrypting it with a password, but typing the wrong password, or using the wrong algorithm to encrypt it, thus making it unreadable at the other end.
It's different due to the irony factor... Man bites dog.
If you were a staunch advocate of strong passwords, but you yourself couldn't remember your own password... That would be similar.
I think you're just taking this as something it's not.
Coal plants put out a lot of arsenic and radioisotopes, among other things. Releasing it from smoke stacks is bad enough. When it's coming out of exaust pipes on busy streets, we're gonna have some problems.
What in the world makes you think you'd have those comming out of your car's exhaust? Your car isn't burning the coal...
Nobody is bottling up the exhaust and spraying it into your car engine. The algae is converting those particles it can feed-on into biodiesel, not more coal. You got that? It's CONVERTING it...
The algae are then used to create methanol and biodiesel. What happens when you burn the methanol and biodiesel?
An infinite loop:-)
Okay, that's not quite true, since you'd have greatly diminishing returns... Still, you'd get powerplants much, much closer to 100% effeciency on the fuel that they currently use.
This test is pure bullshit. The only thing it proves is that people don't instantly adapt. If you had done the opposite, taking drivers accustomed to older cars and putting them in a new car with high-tech safety features, they'd fail all the same...
ABS is a very good example. When it came out, it was causing a large number of accidents. People accustomed to standard brakes would continue their "cadence-braking" techniques on their new ABS-equiped vehicles, and would therefore be unable to stop.
Even though people are accustomed to it now, I personally dislike ABS because of the trade-offs made... It is a system that assumes that less braking ability is okay, provided you are still able to steer. That make be true a lot of the time, but not always. When you have to slam on your brakes, but you still roll into an accident, you can thank ABS for that...
so, how exactly do the sectors get remapped etc when they're sitting on the shelf nowhere near a computer?;)
Better question... how do DVD-RAM sectors go bad if they're just sitting on a shelf, nowhere near a computer?
Sector remapping is specifically for when sectors of the disc have been over-written a few thousand times, and so start going bad from over-use.
Actually, a better option than DVD-RAM is write-once MO discs with 100+ year (data) warranties, or perhaps Blu-ray discs, since they are based on Sony's high-end MO disc technology.
If your case is such that your hard drives are hot to the touch, don't blame the drive for failing. I think that's what causes most of the failures.
I'll agree that's probably the #1 cause of failure. However, I certainly believe it is appropriate to blame the drive. You can have dammed good airflow in your case, and still have a hard drive burning up.
Unlike CPUs, power supplies, etc., hard drive manufacturers don't give a damn about power requirements/heat, and so go so far overboard you now need a large, fast fan, dedicated to each hard drive.
Seagate seems to be the best in this regard, which might explain their standard 5 year warranty...
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No they don't.
No they can't.
They can talk about it all they want. Digital radio has been a SPECTACULAR failure everywhere it has been tried. The public doesn't want it, and broadcasters don't want it. Nobody wants to pay for it, nobody wants to risk losing any stations or any listeners, etc.
Analog radio is quite safe for at least the next decade.
You've been listening to Clear Channel stations far too much... Find an independant radio station on the dial, and you'll find they don't have some automated list of the lowest-common-denominator songs, repeated 15 times every single day.
Helps? HELPS???
Northbridges were well on their way to SURPASSING the CPU as the most power-hungry chip in a computer. I had an Asus motherboard with a KT600 chipset, that was drawing ~45watts! to support my ~70watt CPU. How insane is that!
I have repeatedly contacted Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, VIA, SIS, and NVidia, requesting any power consumption figures they were willing to provide, and NONE of them gave any reply. I guess very few people ever picked up on that problem, because I still haven't seen motherboard power specs ever listed by any companies or review sites.
Although CnQ (Cool and Quiet) has completely reversed the situation, 32-bit Athlons did deserve their reputations for being hot.
When it was P3 vs Athlon, the Athlons were clearly much hotter, although they did have better performance. When it came to P4 vs Athlon, the situation got more complex.
Although Pentium 4s have a peak heat/power rating higher than any Athlon, AMD made a huge mistake with the Athlons, and make their chips unable to idle when recieving a HLT, unless the northbridge was disconnected, requiring motherboards to be more advanced, and causing a great deal of problems. So, practically no motherboards included S2K Bus Disconnect support, as it is called, until quite recently. The point being that AMD cpus would only vary perhaps 5watt from idle to max load (staying right at that 76w mark) whereas an idle Pentium 3/4 would drop down to a tiny fraction of its maximum power when not maxed-out.
What's more, motherboards that implimented S2K support did a pretty crappy job of it, in order to prevent any possible hardware problems. So while a Pentium 4 system can drop down below 50% of it's max power draw when idle, I haven't yet seen an Athlon system that could do so.
As I said, CnQ has completely reversed this, not only FINALLY giving AMD decent power management, but also putting them far, far ahead of Intel (and VIA) now. My point is simply that comparing only their "thermal design power" numbers is very, very misleading.
That's a HILARIOUS comment, because Intel also recently announced that they would retire "Intel Inside".
This coincidence sounds completely accidental on your part, which is too bad, because it could have been the best... troll... ever!
Did you miss my "do not make any mention of it in their EULA" sentence?
ABS would have to be perfect, a human would not. A human can decide each time how much or how little skid is acceptable. ABS has no way to do so. To be superior in all situations, it would have to do just that, or do a perfect job apply brake pressure. A human also knows exactly what tires are on the car, how well they grip, how wet the road is, the weight distribution of the vehicle, etc. All kinds of things an ABS knows nothing about, that significantly affects braking.
We are not talking about tiny distances that you even need to mark-off... Most ABSs seriously increase braking distance, at higher speeds. Try braking at 70MPH, and you'll see a difference of more than a car-length between ABS and standard brakes.
The very fact that ABS pulses, rather than applying a certain level of consistent pressure, should tell you that it's not a precise method at all.
You can "suspect" all you want, but you obviously have no experience in the area, and no idea what you are talking about. Just try to find a couple people with real knowledge and experience with brake systems, that say a notable number of ABSs give you shorter stoping distances than even a moderately skilled driver with standard brakes. You won't because, as I said from the very beginning, THAT ISN'T WHAT ABS WAS DESIGNED TO DO. It was designed to help drivers maintain steering during panic stops, not to reduce stoping distances. It technically has that potential as well, but the equipment advanced enough to do so in standard vehicles is a long way off.
In fact, I think we'll see regenerative braking entirely replace antilock brakes before ABSs get to that point, which can (fairly easily) provide far superior braking than ABS.
Nope and nope.
Spyware does silently install itself thanks to Internet Explorer vulnerabilities, without the users clicking anything.
Even on my Windows test system, which I barely use, I've found myself to end-up with spyware... There are several programs out there that include spyware, but do not make any mention of it in their EULA. And once you get one spyware program installed, it will likely download and install others on it's own.
Spyware can not be prevented, even by the eternally vigilant, unless you have practically nothing installed on your computer. Sure, the people with 40 different "search bars" are probably not reading the EULAs, but even in that case, antivirus programs should remove it. Just because it's vaguely mentioned in an EULA doesn't make viruses legal.
If this is an intentional backdoor, it is the crappiest one, EVER!
You'd want something in the base system of ALL Windows version, which couldn't be disabled AT ALL, doesn't require a user to be logged-in as an admin, or stupid enough to open anything sent to them.
If I was making a backdoor, I'd put it in something basic... Have the IP stack open a port when recieving a specially-crafted packet. Have the filesystem driver silently execute a file if it find a special signature in it (eg. code embedded in a cookie/web-page), etc.
That's not even the good part... The good part is that he was insisting that ADMIN accounts not get raw sockets, but it was fine for SYS...
I feel sorry for the poor sap at Microsoft that got the job of trying to explain to GRC that his plan doesn't make any sense. That concept still hasn't sunk-in, through his tinfoil hat...
You can make that bet, but you would lose...
No. That's only true if ABSs do an absolutely PERFECT job, which is realistically impossible... Even the NTHSB admits that ABS increasing braking distances on dry/wet asphalt. Even if ABS was tuned incredibly well (which is quite the opposite of all my experience) a human who knows how to brake properly, in a car without ABS, will still have the advantage.
I can tell you from experience that disabling ABS (on numerous cars) results in much better braking distances.
That's fine, in theory, but this isn't a discussion on the theoretical braking. Comparing the braking ability of actual ABS systems to non-ABS systems is much more complex.
Sorry, but that doesn't prove anything at all, unless you are also insisting that all ABSs are perfectly configured to match the maximum that your tires can handle... which doesn't even pass the laugh test.
You sound confused. ABS isn't power-assisted braking, it's antilock braking. That means it limits the ammount of force you can exert on the brakes to keep the wheels from locking, for one reason: so you can steer while you are standing on the brake pedal. It is to prevent you from sliding sideways, and in no-way helps you stop more quickly. That's particularly true on dry asphalt.
Actually, that says a lot more about the improvements in tires, brakes, decreasing vehicle weight, (presumably) popularity of front-wheel drive, etc., than it does about ABS.
The fact that your anecdotal experience didn't result in an accident, doesn't change the fact that ABS increases braking distances, when you need your brakes the most.
No.
It's different due to the irony factor... Man bites dog.
If you were a staunch advocate of strong passwords, but you yourself couldn't remember your own password... That would be similar.
I think you're just taking this as something it's not.
What in the world makes you think you'd have those comming out of your car's exhaust? Your car isn't burning the coal...
Nobody is bottling up the exhaust and spraying it into your car engine. The algae is converting those particles it can feed-on into biodiesel, not more coal. You got that? It's CONVERTING it...
An infinite loop
Okay, that's not quite true, since you'd have greatly diminishing returns... Still, you'd get powerplants much, much closer to 100% effeciency on the fuel that they currently use.
This test is pure bullshit. The only thing it proves is that people don't instantly adapt. If you had done the opposite, taking drivers accustomed to older cars and putting them in a new car with high-tech safety features, they'd fail all the same...
ABS is a very good example. When it came out, it was causing a large number of accidents. People accustomed to standard brakes would continue their "cadence-braking" techniques on their new ABS-equiped vehicles, and would therefore be unable to stop.
Even though people are accustomed to it now, I personally dislike ABS because of the trade-offs made... It is a system that assumes that less braking ability is okay, provided you are still able to steer. That make be true a lot of the time, but not always. When you have to slam on your brakes, but you still roll into an accident, you can thank ABS for that...
Did you trying putting on your robe and wizard hat?
Better question... how do DVD-RAM sectors go bad if they're just sitting on a shelf, nowhere near a computer?
Sector remapping is specifically for when sectors of the disc have been over-written a few thousand times, and so start going bad from over-use.
Actually, a better option than DVD-RAM is write-once MO discs with 100+ year (data) warranties, or perhaps Blu-ray discs, since they are based on Sony's high-end MO disc technology.
I'll agree that's probably the #1 cause of failure. However, I certainly believe it is appropriate to blame the drive. You can have dammed good airflow in your case, and still have a hard drive burning up.
Unlike CPUs, power supplies, etc., hard drive manufacturers don't give a damn about power requirements/heat, and so go so far overboard you now need a large, fast fan, dedicated to each hard drive.
Seagate seems to be the best in this regard, which might explain their standard 5 year warranty...