Not too hard - they're on sale almost anywhere if you know where to look: inside a 9 volt battery. Most name-brand alkaline 9V batteries consist of 6 AAAA cells in series; there are a few off-brands which aren't in that configuration, but IIRC Energizer and Duracell both use the 6xAAAA configuration. It's a fairly simple matter of levering the outer case of a 9 volt battery open and simply popping the AAAAs out.
One caveat: they can be a bit shorter than "true" AAAA cells. This site details the trials and tribulations of finding a decent set of AAAAs in a review of a penlight using the same; it contains some nice pictures of opening a 9 volt battery case, too.
These instructions provide a good start, but they simply don't cut it against the newer strains of spyware. I am known as a "computer guy" among friends and family, and thus get called upon to solve spyware problems fairly regularly; the ingenuity of the spyware pushers continues to astound me. Here's a partial list of things I had to remove by hand on my last 4-hour session on one computer, after running Spybot S&D and Adaware:
An Active Desktop background which displayed an ad for spyware removal. This was a pain since it was locked into place using the Group Policy security system, the tools for which aren't available on an XP Home system.
A couple of processes which managed to get themselves into Safe Mode. I had to use a Bart-PE Windows LiveCD to kill them
About 20 Browser Helper Objects, including one which inserted its own referrer links into Google results and 3 toolbars, and 50 startup processes that neither Spybot nor Adaware found
While automated tools are useful, and will likely become more useful as the market matures, they are certainly not a panacea. These days, the only way to eliminate spyware is to not get it in the first place; that's where we, as computer professionals, should be focusing our efforts.
For your requirements, it seems to me that a UPS is pretty much the only solution. However, it might not be so difficult to bring one with you, if you can obtain lead-acid batteries while you are in Africa (probably not so terrible, although I don't know how removed from civilization you will be). If weight is a concern, you might buy some small UPSes in the US that have the features you need, remove the batteries here, then ship them to Africa and buy new batteries locally; most UPSes have fairly standardized lead-acid gel cells, and it might be possible to hack in larger batteries if you can't find precisely what you need once overseas. One caveat: if you're going for weight savings, the large transformers inside UPSes are still quite heavy and might make this option less attractive. Still, it's worth investigation.
Another idea might be to roll your own. This would involve buying a large-capacity 12V power supply capable of running from whatever voltage/frequency combination you'll have in Africa and a high-capacity inverter here in the US, shipping them to Africa, and using them to create a UPS together with car batteries purchased locally. If you have some hardware and driver experience, you could probably create an automatic shutdown system without much trouble, and might even be able to create an automated battery-maintenance system which delivers a slightly higher charge every few months to prevent sulfation (discussed in the linked article). This setup has the advantage of being a true UPS: it will provide power filtering and protection up to the point where either the battery goes dead or the battery chargers take one for the team and catch on fire. Also, it's incredibly scalable; with enough batteries, you could run a computer room for weeks without power.
To answer your question, we really need more information. For most situations, an encrypted link between the sender and reciever would do what you need; this can be done in hardware fairly cheaply and would work well. Directional antennas would also work.
Still, there are situations where these would be unworkable: severe cost restrictions might rule out encryption, or a moving transmitter might rule out a highly directional antenna on the reciever. What is needed is more information: what are your limitations? Just what is the mystery device you're designing intended to do?
Without any futher information, all I can suggest is to look into programs like SSH and standards like IPSec; these might give you a good idea of where to start if you can spare some simple computing hardware at each end. Ultimately, since you have a software background, I would suggest viewing the system you're creating as not unlike a VPN: you must create a secure trust boundary across a network which may harbor attackers. There's already significant development in identifying spoofed senders across the Internet; what you have to do is to transfer those concepts into the world of radio. While the two domains are certainly not isomorphic, there is a large body of knowledge that can be mapped from one to the other. The links I have given you, and the advice from other posters in this thread, should give you a good start.
Investors aren't like you and me. They are you and me. Most of the people reading Slashdot right now probably have a nest egg stashed away in a 401(k), and many probably have investments in stocks and mutual funds.
The real reason there isn't the incredible outcry over conmen like Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay, and the man linked is because people don't realize that they, too, are part of the "investor class." Many people think that Enron's failure resulted in nothing more than a few robber barons transplanted from the 19th century having to switch their Cuban cigars to Dominican; they don't realize that they are being hit in the pocketbook, and that people who invested large amounts their life's savings were taken for a ride.
As for investors not doing enough research, that's simply not true. If you will remember, it was a fairly large scandal a few months ago that stock analysts - people who are hired by brokerages to deliver an unbiased analysis - were rating stocks highly, but privately commenting that those stocks weren't worth the paper their certificates were printed on. The end result was that investors who did everything "right" and read all the research available were actually more likely to get ripped off than someone who simply picked stocks because they had a cool-sounding name.
As alluded to in the article, the next chapter in the war against spammers is not going to be in blocking open relays or known spammers. Rather, more and more spammers are using hordes of broadband-connected and spyware/virus-infested zombie hosts to do their dirty business.
This has both good and bad aspects. First, the good news: responsible ISPs will be able to block a good portion of spam at their routers and mailservers; it's not hard to detect and blacklist a PC which is spewing the same email to 20,000 different recipients. Unfortunately, it only takes a few poorly-configured ISPs to provide a great deal of bandwidth to spammers. Couple this with Windows' known security holes, and home users' typical apathy regarding patches and security updates, and you have a large pool of potential spam-hosts which cannot be as easily targeted as open relays or specialized spam-spewing servers. After all, if spammers are using a legitimate ISP's mail server to send spam, a remote admin can't block that mail server without also condemning large amounts of legitimate email to deletion, which may well be unacceptable.
The upshot of all this? The onus of spam filtering is going to be, more and more, on ISPs rather than on recipients. While this has its good side - spam filtered at the source doesn't take up as much precious bandwidth - it also means that filtering will be more difficult for those not close to the source.
First, why would you need a multitap transformer to output different voltages? Simply set up a switch-mode power supply, like in a computer PSU: use a bridge circut, transformer and a couple of filter caps to get a few hundred DC volts, then use a transistor to pulse the output at a few hundred kilohertz. Output voltage equals duty cycle times input voltage; run it through a simple filter and you're done.
As for overcurrent protection, there's been a device around as long as mankind has harnessed electricity: the fuse. It's cheap, easy to find, fails gracefully (as long as going open-circut won't kill anyone) and easy to integrate into almost any device. If blowing fuses is a regular concern (why?), then use circut breakers instead.
Sort of. While it would be necessary to have 32 qubits to build a 32-bit processor, that processor would be radically different from the one that's probably in your computer right now.
Quantum computers probably won't ever displace conventional computers completely; while there are some tasks at which they excel, they would be incredibly inefficient for typical computer tasks. A more realistic role for a quantum computer would be a coprocessor - when the host CPU is presented with a problem that could be better solved by a quantum computer, it offloads that problem to a dedicated quantum computer to which it is attached.
It would be a tremendous waste of technology to use a quantum computer to evaluate operations which are serial, rather than parallel, in nature. While this may someday change - there was, after all, a day when all the computers in the world didn't have as many transistors as are in a single modern desktop - it is likely that for the forseeable future, quantum computers will remain far too valuable and rare to be used for anything a more conventional computer could do as well.
A company called Xitel makes the "Hi-Fi Link," a USB-based audio-out gadget. I haven't used it, but it looks like a good solution: USB has several major advantages when outputting analog data. First, it lives outside the electromagnetic noise storm that is the typical computer case. Second, it acts as a second audio device: this means you can, if you wish, hook up cheap speakers to your soundcard for system sounds, and output nothing but music to your hi-fi system (I use this system, with two soundcards, and it is far better than having Windows or Gnome intersperse your music with noises).
Another solution is to get a card with S/PDIF digital output and an amp which supports it. This is a good solution if you already have such a soundcard, but the soundcard upgrade can be expensive. On the whole, if you're starting from scratch, I'd go with USB.
You know, a lot of people said the same thing about the study of number theory prior to World War II. Of course, number theory turned out to be a decisive factor in the war - it allowed the Allied forces to break Axis codes and gain a clear view of the situation behind enemy lines. In both the Pacific theater (especially Midway) and the European theater, it was the esoteric field of number theory which won battles and saved thousands of lives.
What about quantum physics? Those esoteric investigations turned into the transistor and the atomic bomb; they indisputably changed the course of history forever. You almost certainly wouldn't be reading this right now if it weren't for research that, at the time it was done, seemed extremely theroretical and devoid of any practical use.
Does this mean that Mersenne primes are destined for this kind of greatness? Of course not. Still, just because something has no immediate practical value, doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing.
Actually, the cost is exactly the same, whether you heat your home with computer waste heat or electric heat. 1 kWh costs the same whether it goes into a computer or a heater, and thermodynamics ensures that a computer consuming 400W will eventually output every last bit of that energy; almost all of it is turned directly into heat (the second law, of course, says that it will all eventually end up as heat). You might get more benefit out of putting a kWh into your computer, rather than a heater, but you pay the same amount.
The only "free" heat is reverse-cycle air conditioning, which heats by using an air conditioner to cool the outside air, and even that incurs energy costs to run the compressor and pumps. You most certainly pay for the heat coming out of your computer!
This isn't about turning off domains like.kr. Rather, it's about turning off Unicode support in domain names - currently, in browsers which support IDN, it's possible to send someone to a URL which looks like "https://www.paypal.com" but really has a letter replaced with a non-English Unicode character which looks the same. This deactivation turns off support for Unicode domain names, not national domains.
Even without DVD and video sales, movies are still a highly profitable business. A worthwhile analogy to theater releases might be with a Las Vegas casino: while a tourist might win a $1 million jackpot, the other players in the casino will probably lose that much in an hour or two, and the casino will end up with a large profit at the end of the day.
Similarly, while there are occasional flops like Gigli or Battlefield Earth, the difference is more than made up by even one blockbuster movie. DVD and video sales are just icing on the cake.
The Cell workstation in question is not a home/office computer; not running Linux because it's hard to install or a scanner won't work is not an issue. The workstation is closer to a Sun or SGI system - very expensive, and faster than almost anything in the x86 world.
The target market is not home users but rather scientists, animators, engineers, and others who need raw power and aren't concerned with the fact that Word won't work on it; many customers will probably have a cheap PC sitting next to it for office tasks, freeing up the workstation to do nothing but grind through computations. In this world, various unicies are the only serious choice; SGIs run IRIX or Linux, Suns run Solaris or Linux, and IBMs run AIX or Linux.
Take into account IBM's commitment to Linux, and the fact that many of their customers already use it, and it's almost certain that Linux will be a major OS choice for Cell workstation customers, particularly those working in a mixed-architecture environment. While it's likely to run AIX and a Windows port is possible, it's almost certain that a majority of Cell workstations will be running Linux.
OK, I'll bite the troll: Where is the "intellectual irresponsibility?" The reality is that to create a secure system, you must understand how it will be attacked. Would you trust a locksmith who didn't understand safecracking? Similarly, it's important for IT and computer science students to understand how their systems might be compromised by attackers and how spammers might try to get around their filters.
If locksmiths understand how safes they build will be attacked by safecrackers, they can reinforce critical points and develop devices to seal the safe if a breach is detected. The idea carries over well into IT and compsci - programmers and sysadmins who understand how their systems might be attacked will be able to reinforce against unauthorized access and find potential security breaches. It's one thing to simply say that "checking your input to make sure it fits in the buffer is good" or that "Bayesian filtering is good," but it's another thing entirely to understand and implement attacks and methods to exploit weaknesses in a system.
Why use an LCD tach at all? It seems to me a better idea would be a row of LEDs along the top of the dash, shrouded from outside light - one for every 500 RPM would probably be sufficient for an automatic, or maybe one per 200 RPM for a manual. This would not only provide a solution with very low latency, but would also mean one less thing to display on the main screen, freeing up a goodly amount of space for the various things mentioned in the article.
Perhaps the risk of a system compromise? An analogy might be bomb threats - while almost all are made by bored kids looking to stir up trouble, the potential for damage if the threat is real means it's prudent to evacuate the area, call in the bomb squad, and take other preventative measures. Similarly, although the risk of a system compromise is low, it is not a bad idea to take the system offline and make absolutely sure it is safe before any other buisiness is conducted through it.
In cases like this, while the risk is low, the potential for damage is high - better to take the safe road.
A big part of it is the fact that while it's possible for almost any man to at least get in shape, it's impossible for any woman to attain the hypersexualized ideal presented in male-oriented media like most comic books and games.
Another thing is the role of men vs the role of women in games. While many games have moved forward, you're still far more likely to find a strong, tough male hero rescuing a screaming, weak female than the reverse.
The problem is not that games or other media establish negative stereotypes, but rather that they perpetuate them. Unfortunately for game companies, however, if they continue to perpetuate these stereotypes, they will find female interest in their products elusive at best.
While you make some interesting points, there are a couple of impressions your post leaves that could be clarified.
First, it's not true that Apple has always bungled major hardware transitions. I'm thinking in particular of the 68k -> PowerPC architecture transition; Apple managed to move its entire customer base from one processor architecture to another without much hassle. When you consider the dismal results Intel has seen trying to move workstations and servers to Itanium, that's no small accomplishment. While the situations are certainly somewhat different, Apple still managed to make a massive shift in a manner almost completely transparent to the end user.
Second, Apple certainly hasn't focused on iPod to the degree you claim. Apple have been pushing it hard lately; that's because they've found a profitable niche and are exploiting it. What they haven't done is lost focus on the Mac; in fact, there's a new Mac you may have heard of that's selling quite well. In fact, Apple seem to be using products like the iPod and iTunes as a "wedge" to get consumers to switch to the Mac - after all, if you use iTunes, the fact that you won't have to worry about your music when switching to a Mac removes one barrier . If enough of those barriers go down and there's no large difficulties in moving to the Mac, consumers may well flee Windows in droves. In fact, I wouldn't be too suprised to see most of Apple's iLife suite get PC ports soon.
Apple has made some colossal blunders, but their moves haven't been all bad. In fact, I would say that they're rapidly moving to where they were when the Mac first came out - the only purveyors of a truly user-friendly computer. Let's just hope they don't screw up again.
Outlaw CAPTCHAs? I agree that they are a hideous usability-breaking kludge, but to outlaw them certainly seems to be overreacting.
To allow governments to actually control the content of websites on such a fine level seems rather draconian to me. Also, while they're typically buried, some websites provide an audio-based alternative; I know that Hotmail offers this. It seems to me that you should rather lobby websites which offer no alternative for blind or vision-impaired users to change their policies.
Finally, I'd like to note that with relatively young eyes and a surplus CAD-workstation monitor, I also find the Yahoo CAPTCHAs difficult to see. The problem is not your eyes, it is rather that in trying to make graphics illegible to computers the algorithm has managed to make the graphics illegible to humans as well.
You know the world's coming to an end when a team of security experts from a respected institution advises wrapping your car keys in tinfoil so the Bad Guys can't intercept the secret signal!
And even Microsoft dare not put a single advertisement in its desktop OS.
Sorry, I'd love to refute your claim in more detail, but Windows XP just popped up and said that I had to get a.NET passport.
Really, MS has advertised in its OSes since at least Win 95. Remember when MSN was going to be the AOL-killer and the world's ISP? It was on the desktop of Windows 95. IE was included in Win 98, when it was a direct Netscape competitor. Even in XP, there's not only the.NET Passport, but also the MSN integration, thus neatly closing the circle.
The truth is that MS has quietly advertised its own products in Windows for quite a while. While there aren't any third-party popups, they know that many users will just use what is presented to them on the desktop - thus, they put things like MSN and IE there.
Froogle results are already in the main search area on Google. For example, a search for "AMD Motherboard" returns 3 Froogle results above the main search results. They're marked with a little shopping-bag icon. You can get similar results for news items ("Bush inauguration," with a little newspaper icon) or stock quotes ("rhat," Red Hat's ticker symbol, with a little chart icon).
Personally, I don't think the mini-results above the main search area bother me at all - they can help me find what I want faster, without any real interruption to my search. Images do have issues, as you mentioned - bandwidth and relevance. However, Google has thus far managed to almost seamlessly integrate many different types of results into a simple, well-designed page; I doubt that they would simply plug images into search results without considering ways to mitigate any issues that may occur.
How is popularity a bad goal? All the other goals you mentioned are indeed important, but popularity means that you're giving the user what they want. To deal with changing from IE to Firefox, people have to recognize that it's not only better, but that it's so much better that it warrants dealing with learning new software, migrating all your old information from IE, and dealing with things like IE-only sites. Admittedly, Firefox does do a good job in minimizing these hassles, but they certainly still exist.
Popularity doesn't just mean that you're better than the competition; if you displace a market leader for your position, you are so much better than the competition that using your product is worth dealing with all the hassles involved in switching. Firefox's popularity means it has really succeeded not only in creating a better product than IE but in creating a truly excellent browser.
A note to those who haven't read the book: spoilers present.
While the erosion of the mind is a main theme in A Scanner Darkly, it is not the only theme presented. In fact, the psychological split between addict and police officer is arguably more important to the book.
Dick has stated that in A Scanner Darkly, he wanted to investigate the mind of an undercover agent - one who works toward one set of goals in one persona, then works to undermine those goals as another persona. While Substance D (the drug in the book, for those who don't know) exacerbates the problem and creates two independent entities from one mind, it is arguable that anyone trying to work undercover must segregate their mind in the same fashion. While the theme of descent into madness is certainly a large part of A Scanner Darkly, as well as many of Dick's other works, it is not the only theme.
I would imagine that it would be extremely difficult to adapt the theme of a split personality to film. While the artists could certainly provide differing character traits to each half of the split personality, it seems that it would be difficult to maintain the cognitive dissonance presented towards the end of the book, in which the two halves seem like completely different characters. It would seem that some innovative cinematography would have to come into play here; it would take a truly talented team of artists to accomplish this. I can only hope that they're up to the task.
Slashdot Mirror
One caveat: they can be a bit shorter than "true" AAAA cells. This site details the trials and tribulations of finding a decent set of AAAAs in a review of a penlight using the same; it contains some nice pictures of opening a 9 volt battery case, too.
- An Active Desktop background which displayed an ad for spyware removal. This was a pain since it was locked into place using the Group Policy security system, the tools for which aren't available on an XP Home system.
- A couple of processes which managed to get themselves into Safe Mode. I had to use a Bart-PE Windows LiveCD to kill them
- About 20 Browser Helper Objects, including one which inserted its own referrer links into Google results and 3 toolbars, and 50 startup processes that neither Spybot nor Adaware found
While automated tools are useful, and will likely become more useful as the market matures, they are certainly not a panacea. These days, the only way to eliminate spyware is to not get it in the first place; that's where we, as computer professionals, should be focusing our efforts.Another idea might be to roll your own. This would involve buying a large-capacity 12V power supply capable of running from whatever voltage/frequency combination you'll have in Africa and a high-capacity inverter here in the US, shipping them to Africa, and using them to create a UPS together with car batteries purchased locally. If you have some hardware and driver experience, you could probably create an automatic shutdown system without much trouble, and might even be able to create an automated battery-maintenance system which delivers a slightly higher charge every few months to prevent sulfation (discussed in the linked article). This setup has the advantage of being a true UPS: it will provide power filtering and protection up to the point where either the battery goes dead or the battery chargers take one for the team and catch on fire. Also, it's incredibly scalable; with enough batteries, you could run a computer room for weeks without power.
Still, there are situations where these would be unworkable: severe cost restrictions might rule out encryption, or a moving transmitter might rule out a highly directional antenna on the reciever. What is needed is more information: what are your limitations? Just what is the mystery device you're designing intended to do?
Without any futher information, all I can suggest is to look into programs like SSH and standards like IPSec; these might give you a good idea of where to start if you can spare some simple computing hardware at each end. Ultimately, since you have a software background, I would suggest viewing the system you're creating as not unlike a VPN: you must create a secure trust boundary across a network which may harbor attackers. There's already significant development in identifying spoofed senders across the Internet; what you have to do is to transfer those concepts into the world of radio. While the two domains are certainly not isomorphic, there is a large body of knowledge that can be mapped from one to the other. The links I have given you, and the advice from other posters in this thread, should give you a good start.
The real reason there isn't the incredible outcry over conmen like Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay, and the man linked is because people don't realize that they, too, are part of the "investor class." Many people think that Enron's failure resulted in nothing more than a few robber barons transplanted from the 19th century having to switch their Cuban cigars to Dominican; they don't realize that they are being hit in the pocketbook, and that people who invested large amounts their life's savings were taken for a ride.
As for investors not doing enough research, that's simply not true. If you will remember, it was a fairly large scandal a few months ago that stock analysts - people who are hired by brokerages to deliver an unbiased analysis - were rating stocks highly, but privately commenting that those stocks weren't worth the paper their certificates were printed on. The end result was that investors who did everything "right" and read all the research available were actually more likely to get ripped off than someone who simply picked stocks because they had a cool-sounding name.
This has both good and bad aspects. First, the good news: responsible ISPs will be able to block a good portion of spam at their routers and mailservers; it's not hard to detect and blacklist a PC which is spewing the same email to 20,000 different recipients. Unfortunately, it only takes a few poorly-configured ISPs to provide a great deal of bandwidth to spammers. Couple this with Windows' known security holes, and home users' typical apathy regarding patches and security updates, and you have a large pool of potential spam-hosts which cannot be as easily targeted as open relays or specialized spam-spewing servers. After all, if spammers are using a legitimate ISP's mail server to send spam, a remote admin can't block that mail server without also condemning large amounts of legitimate email to deletion, which may well be unacceptable.
The upshot of all this? The onus of spam filtering is going to be, more and more, on ISPs rather than on recipients. While this has its good side - spam filtered at the source doesn't take up as much precious bandwidth - it also means that filtering will be more difficult for those not close to the source.
As for overcurrent protection, there's been a device around as long as mankind has harnessed electricity: the fuse. It's cheap, easy to find, fails gracefully (as long as going open-circut won't kill anyone) and easy to integrate into almost any device. If blowing fuses is a regular concern (why?), then use circut breakers instead.
Quantum computers probably won't ever displace conventional computers completely; while there are some tasks at which they excel, they would be incredibly inefficient for typical computer tasks. A more realistic role for a quantum computer would be a coprocessor - when the host CPU is presented with a problem that could be better solved by a quantum computer, it offloads that problem to a dedicated quantum computer to which it is attached.
It would be a tremendous waste of technology to use a quantum computer to evaluate operations which are serial, rather than parallel, in nature. While this may someday change - there was, after all, a day when all the computers in the world didn't have as many transistors as are in a single modern desktop - it is likely that for the forseeable future, quantum computers will remain far too valuable and rare to be used for anything a more conventional computer could do as well.
Another solution is to get a card with S/PDIF digital output and an amp which supports it. This is a good solution if you already have such a soundcard, but the soundcard upgrade can be expensive. On the whole, if you're starting from scratch, I'd go with USB.
What about quantum physics? Those esoteric investigations turned into the transistor and the atomic bomb; they indisputably changed the course of history forever. You almost certainly wouldn't be reading this right now if it weren't for research that, at the time it was done, seemed extremely theroretical and devoid of any practical use.
Does this mean that Mersenne primes are destined for this kind of greatness? Of course not. Still, just because something has no immediate practical value, doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing.
The only "free" heat is reverse-cycle air conditioning, which heats by using an air conditioner to cool the outside air, and even that incurs energy costs to run the compressor and pumps. You most certainly pay for the heat coming out of your computer!
This isn't about turning off domains like .kr. Rather, it's about turning off Unicode support in domain names - currently, in browsers which support IDN, it's possible to send someone to a URL which looks like "https://www.paypal.com" but really has a letter replaced with a non-English Unicode character which looks the same. This deactivation turns off support for Unicode domain names, not national domains.
Similarly, while there are occasional flops like Gigli or Battlefield Earth, the difference is more than made up by even one blockbuster movie. DVD and video sales are just icing on the cake.
The target market is not home users but rather scientists, animators, engineers, and others who need raw power and aren't concerned with the fact that Word won't work on it; many customers will probably have a cheap PC sitting next to it for office tasks, freeing up the workstation to do nothing but grind through computations. In this world, various unicies are the only serious choice; SGIs run IRIX or Linux, Suns run Solaris or Linux, and IBMs run AIX or Linux.
Take into account IBM's commitment to Linux, and the fact that many of their customers already use it, and it's almost certain that Linux will be a major OS choice for Cell workstation customers, particularly those working in a mixed-architecture environment. While it's likely to run AIX and a Windows port is possible, it's almost certain that a majority of Cell workstations will be running Linux.
If locksmiths understand how safes they build will be attacked by safecrackers, they can reinforce critical points and develop devices to seal the safe if a breach is detected. The idea carries over well into IT and compsci - programmers and sysadmins who understand how their systems might be attacked will be able to reinforce against unauthorized access and find potential security breaches. It's one thing to simply say that "checking your input to make sure it fits in the buffer is good" or that "Bayesian filtering is good," but it's another thing entirely to understand and implement attacks and methods to exploit weaknesses in a system.
Why use an LCD tach at all? It seems to me a better idea would be a row of LEDs along the top of the dash, shrouded from outside light - one for every 500 RPM would probably be sufficient for an automatic, or maybe one per 200 RPM for a manual. This would not only provide a solution with very low latency, but would also mean one less thing to display on the main screen, freeing up a goodly amount of space for the various things mentioned in the article.
In cases like this, while the risk is low, the potential for damage is high - better to take the safe road.
Another thing is the role of men vs the role of women in games. While many games have moved forward, you're still far more likely to find a strong, tough male hero rescuing a screaming, weak female than the reverse.
The problem is not that games or other media establish negative stereotypes, but rather that they perpetuate them. Unfortunately for game companies, however, if they continue to perpetuate these stereotypes, they will find female interest in their products elusive at best.
First, it's not true that Apple has always bungled major hardware transitions. I'm thinking in particular of the 68k -> PowerPC architecture transition; Apple managed to move its entire customer base from one processor architecture to another without much hassle. When you consider the dismal results Intel has seen trying to move workstations and servers to Itanium, that's no small accomplishment. While the situations are certainly somewhat different, Apple still managed to make a massive shift in a manner almost completely transparent to the end user.
Second, Apple certainly hasn't focused on iPod to the degree you claim. Apple have been pushing it hard lately; that's because they've found a profitable niche and are exploiting it. What they haven't done is lost focus on the Mac; in fact, there's a new Mac you may have heard of that's selling quite well. In fact, Apple seem to be using products like the iPod and iTunes as a "wedge" to get consumers to switch to the Mac - after all, if you use iTunes, the fact that you won't have to worry about your music when switching to a Mac removes one barrier . If enough of those barriers go down and there's no large difficulties in moving to the Mac, consumers may well flee Windows in droves. In fact, I wouldn't be too suprised to see most of Apple's iLife suite get PC ports soon.
Apple has made some colossal blunders, but their moves haven't been all bad. In fact, I would say that they're rapidly moving to where they were when the Mac first came out - the only purveyors of a truly user-friendly computer. Let's just hope they don't screw up again.
To allow governments to actually control the content of websites on such a fine level seems rather draconian to me. Also, while they're typically buried, some websites provide an audio-based alternative; I know that Hotmail offers this. It seems to me that you should rather lobby websites which offer no alternative for blind or vision-impaired users to change their policies.
Finally, I'd like to note that with relatively young eyes and a surplus CAD-workstation monitor, I also find the Yahoo CAPTCHAs difficult to see. The problem is not your eyes, it is rather that in trying to make graphics illegible to computers the algorithm has managed to make the graphics illegible to humans as well.
You know the world's coming to an end when a team of security experts from a respected institution advises wrapping your car keys in tinfoil so the Bad Guys can't intercept the secret signal!
Sorry, I'd love to refute your claim in more detail, but Windows XP just popped up and said that I had to get a .NET passport.
Really, MS has advertised in its OSes since at least Win 95. Remember when MSN was going to be the AOL-killer and the world's ISP? It was on the desktop of Windows 95. IE was included in Win 98, when it was a direct Netscape competitor. Even in XP, there's not only the .NET Passport, but also the MSN integration, thus neatly closing the circle.
The truth is that MS has quietly advertised its own products in Windows for quite a while. While there aren't any third-party popups, they know that many users will just use what is presented to them on the desktop - thus, they put things like MSN and IE there.
Personally, I don't think the mini-results above the main search area bother me at all - they can help me find what I want faster, without any real interruption to my search. Images do have issues, as you mentioned - bandwidth and relevance. However, Google has thus far managed to almost seamlessly integrate many different types of results into a simple, well-designed page; I doubt that they would simply plug images into search results without considering ways to mitigate any issues that may occur.
Popularity doesn't just mean that you're better than the competition; if you displace a market leader for your position, you are so much better than the competition that using your product is worth dealing with all the hassles involved in switching. Firefox's popularity means it has really succeeded not only in creating a better product than IE but in creating a truly excellent browser.
While the erosion of the mind is a main theme in A Scanner Darkly, it is not the only theme presented. In fact, the psychological split between addict and police officer is arguably more important to the book.
Dick has stated that in A Scanner Darkly, he wanted to investigate the mind of an undercover agent - one who works toward one set of goals in one persona, then works to undermine those goals as another persona. While Substance D (the drug in the book, for those who don't know) exacerbates the problem and creates two independent entities from one mind, it is arguable that anyone trying to work undercover must segregate their mind in the same fashion. While the theme of descent into madness is certainly a large part of A Scanner Darkly, as well as many of Dick's other works, it is not the only theme.
I would imagine that it would be extremely difficult to adapt the theme of a split personality to film. While the artists could certainly provide differing character traits to each half of the split personality, it seems that it would be difficult to maintain the cognitive dissonance presented towards the end of the book, in which the two halves seem like completely different characters. It would seem that some innovative cinematography would have to come into play here; it would take a truly talented team of artists to accomplish this. I can only hope that they're up to the task.