I think many people are in a situation similar to yours. You have existing hardware that suits your needs, and with no pressing new needs, you will continue to use it indefinitely. But all things change, eventually.
All those parts are interrelated. When it comes time to replace any one of those pieces, be it the car stereo, the car itself, the phone, the Zune, or possibly even the little FM transceiver, you're going to re-evaluate your stuff in terms of what you want to hang on to.
Note that replacing a cell phone will usually cost another service contract commitment, but nothing out of pocket. It's an easy choice for people to make. And I think today that pretty much all of the subsidized phones include MP3 players.
Fixing or replacing a broken Zune may cost $100. Replacing a broken car stereo will cost $100 or more Replacing a broken FM transmitter is about $40. Replacing a broken car is a lot of money.
A reasonable person might say "I now have situation X. Getting a new phone would help me address it, and they're 'free'. And they all come with music players, so I don't have to carry separate device Y anymore? Sign me up!"
Are the free phone music player applications any good? Not the ones I've seen, but that's a different issue. If money is the primary issue, they may be the only option. If the Zune still works, and is so much better than the free phone app, you may continue to carry the separate device. But most people probably wouldn't repair or replace a broken Zune with another separate player, at least not anymore.
The iPad and tablet computing is still a different market, more related to eBooks and web surfing than music and phone calls. Maybe what you were thinking of is the iPod Touch, which seems like it's being rebranded as a sort of mini-tablet. But I don't know that the Touch will continue to be sold forever. It's too expensive to not be a phone. And it doesn't bring any of the advantages of a tablet.
But did you like it enough to carry a Zune plus a mobile phone? As soon as I got a phone that played music, I ditched the separate MP3 player, never to carry it again.
Zune's biggest problem here is that even modestly smart phones now cover the portable music playing needs of most people. The dedicated hardware was priced about the same as a smart phone without the phone, meaning as a consumer I could pay more for a lame phone and good music player, or I could buy an integrated device for less.
This was just Microsoft analyzing their cards and wisely folding their hand, as there are few winning scenarios in the music player market anymore. I suspect the iPod will likely suffer a similar fate, so it makes me wonder how long it will take Apple to come to the same conclusion?
I'm starting to see this problem in Google too. Google seems to be going off in a million different directions lately, with no apparent overarching plan.
Something recently has started to happen to counter this exact thing at Google. Someone high-up shut down Google Labs last month, and ended most of those projects. It was supposedly a part of renewing their focus on their core business. And while it often seems like Google's core business is "being cool", being cool doesn't exactly pay the bills, so I suppose they have to figure out more new things to generate revenue.
What are some of the million new directions you see coming out of Google?
I think the simplicity of Macs from the beginning was what inspired schools to use them, particularly for junior grade kids. It wasn't just a case of the money.
The history of Apple getting into schools is long and nowhere near that simple. It was a case of money, time to market, competition, inertia, vendor lock-in, and possibly corruption (depending on how you define it.) And yes, simplicity was a factor.
Apple made deals with school systems to purchase Apple ][ back in the late 1970s, and got them in schools long before IBM arrived with the IBM PC. Being older, they were cheaper and less capable, but because they were the first exposure to computers for a lot of kids, those kids fell in love with them. And it happened long before Macintosh came on the scene. When the IBM PC came around, Apples were already in many schools.
I remember a discussion with my dad in 1979, where I thought that Apple was going to be the primary computers at work too, because they were already so widespread in schools. Having seen IBM's corporate marketers in action, he said "you have no idea how IBM's marketing team works. When IBM enters the market, they are going to completely dominate it. They play hardball." And he was absolutely right.
Then came the PC. IBM's market strategy for the PCs was simple: target the Big Corporations of America, because they have big budgets and lots of IBM hardware already, and IBM was interested in their higher price tags and huge volumes. IBM had done business this way for decades, and were really, really good at it. Sure, they wanted to sell to the home market, but it wasn't their primary focus. The idea was to get PCs in front of everyone at work in hopes they'd go home and buy a PC for home use. IBM PCs remained the choice for Corporate America, mostly because their IBM reps sold them the PCs as "business" machines instead of those Apple "toys". IBM had long been telling their corporate customers "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", back when IBM's primary threat were the mainframe clones by companies like Amdahl. They continued to repeat it to sell the PCs. And IBM sales forces had golden measures of persuasion. (Let's just say you really missed something if you never personally witnessed it.) And here, IBM won, hands down. PCs absolutely dominated the corporate market.
But the home market wasn't that simple. Lots of homes had kids who wanted Apples like they had in school, so there was a divide between Mom and Dad, and Junior and Sis. Not really seeing much of a difference for themselves, many parents went with Apples at the recommendation of their kids. Remember, at the time, buying home computers was completely new territory for families, and these were very big ticket items for most people. From this, the marketplace learned that education was a driver of primary importance for making computer purchase decisions at home.
When IBM realized they weren't dominating the home market, they applied their business experience and figured it was price point. They introduced the PC Jr. It bombed, because it turned out that the price wasn't the dominant factor. It was a very confusing time for them, especially as the clones entered the market about this same time. They came out with the XT, and the AT, and while businesses were buying them, home users were less interested. For one of the first times in their history, IBM was out of their element.
Later, as the first Macs arrived, the school districts who had contracts with Apple saw them primarily as an upgrade, even though they were an entirely new architecture. The concept of a graphical OS was certainly part of the sale, but I'd bet most of it was inertia - we bought from Apple last year, we'll buy from them again this year. (School board members are elected officials, and are certainly not hired based on intelligence.) Nothing wrong with it, but again, Apple was courting them as heavily as they could while IBM remained focused on the businesses who h
Just to be clear, the parent post means digital prints on photographic paper, and not just ink-jet prints on Epson paper. Photographic paper processes, dyes, and chemistry are fairly well understood, and their lifetimes have been tested in terms of actual years, under many types of storage conditions.
I know that most older ink jet inks degraded fairly quickly even in the best of conditions, and wasn't expected to last for any serious length of time. Some photo printing technologies are better than others. I've heard dye sublimation was tested and shown to be pretty stable, but I've never used it. But I'd check for newer studies too, as these things are being measured all the time. Manufacturers change ink formulations, papers, nozzle technology, etc. It's always different.
If you're destroying drives on your own, go for it. But in any kind of business, even if you don't have some old motherboard with an IDE connector, it's worth spending the $20 on an adapter or card to just DBAN those crappy old drives.
Why? Solely to prevent someone from injuring themselves while destroying old hard drives with a drill, which is bad in itself. It's worse when they bill the company for the ER visit because a spark gets in their eye. It gets even worse when they go on perfectly collectible workers comp and settle a lawsuit because they weren't given safety goggles when they did so.
Absolutely not. If you're in business, what you need most is solid evidence that your data is destroyed.
You can hand a laborer a hammer and punch, safety glasses, and a pair of gloves, and say "here is a pallet of disks: hammer the punch in here until you see this metal down here bulge out. Repeat until this pallet is empty." You say to his supervisor, "We have given him a pallet containing 327 hard drives to destroy. Here is a clipboard with their serial numbers. Check each drive to make sure the damage shows a hole here and a bulge in this spot, then tick this box for each destroyed drive. Once every drive is properly damaged, sign this form attesting to the destruction, then ship the pallet to this recycling center. Your task is finished when every drive is destroyed and accounted for, you've signed the form, and the pallet is on the truck."
You can't easily look at a disk and see if it contains sensitive data or not. You can't easily look at a disk and see if it's wiped. You can pick up a disk from the not-wiped pile and place it in the wiped pile, and nobody will notice. You can make a mistake that ships your company's sensitive data off to some eBay buyer. But you can very easily look at a chunk of metal and assure yourself it's properly damaged. You won't set the damaged disk in the wrong pile. You can't pass off an undamaged disk as a damaged disk. And nobody can accidentally recover the data from a properly damaged disk.
And the reason this is important is simple economics. If you're reselling the disks for $10 bucks each, the most you could make is $3270. If you failed to wipe out the wrong disk, you might be putting your customers credit card or social security numbers or drivers' licenses out into the wild. The repercussions from such a mistake can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of credit repairs and lawsuits. If you're destroying the disks, you will spend a few dollars destroying them and trucking them to the recycling center, but about the most risk you take on is the guy could injure himself.
300,000 hrs = 34.2 years! You might want to double check the specs. I'm betting the 300,000 hrs is MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), which is not directly related to MTTF. MTBF = (total # failures)/(total # hrs). FYI,
The figure of 300,000 hours appears to be based on running 100 disks for one year and counting 3 failures, instead of trying to run ten disks for 100 years and noting they generally fail in year 34. And that is the reason I don't believe published specs can properly reflect the real lifetime of a single hard disk.
The difference between Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) and Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) describes the methodology of the study, and says more about the type of product than the measurement. MTTF is measured when the clock is stopped when a unit fails. MTBF is measured for a fixed duration, with failed units repaired. Expensive items that are easy to repair are better measured in MTBF; while cheap, disposable, hard-to-repair items are better measured in MTTF. Hard drives typically fall under the latter category, as they're viewed as one of the repair components for a more expensive item (the computer system) which is probably measured in MTBF.
Because of the limitations of the testing methodology, neither MTTF nor MTBF provides a meaningful number for a single unit. The problem is that they express reliability in terms of a line based on just a few early data points, but we all know that the real hard disk lifetime plots out as the infamous Bathtub Curve. Think about it in terms of explaining these concepts to a manager who is about to sign a contract for 10,000 drives. He just wants to know if he can expect ten failures every month or one failure every year. It's a simplification because most people don't want to incorporate the bathtub curve into a contract, and because the vendors have to get the drives out on the market long before they can complete an actual test for the drive lifetime.
As I said further below, most old drives are not worth salvaging. Sure, modern drives are more energy efficient, faster, have higher storage capacities, but those are attributes that don't matter to a lot of still-useful applications. The problem with old hard drives is that the mechanisms are worn. They have a finite lifetime. A large number of inexpensive hard drives won't last more than four years or so. Do you really want to go to the work of salvaging, erasing, and installing an old drive in a new box, just to have that drive fail in the next three or six months?
I remove the magnets from their steel keepers. Most are glued on with an adhesive designed only to keep them in place, not to hold them together. By using a pocket knife or utility razor as a wedge, and a plastic screwdriver handle as a light hammer, most magnets can easily be removed with little or no damage.
But it turned out to be dangerous in two ways, the lesser of which was hammering a sharpened knife blade. I stacked the harvested raw magnets into two-inch-thick stacks (perhaps a dozen magnets each.) Each stack then has an extremely powerful field, the kind that is almost impossible to pull straight apart with ordinary muscle strength. Having two large stacks separated by a surprisingly large distance (a foot apart on the workbench top) is not always enough, and if they overcome the friction of the surface the stacks can slam together with both high force and high velocity. They will crush flesh and bone.
When I worked as a Data Security Tech we formatted them with 1's and 0's 7 times before crushing them with a drill press. NO ONE could recover that data.
You crushed them with a drill press? Here's a tip: the switch on the drill press makes the pointed thing spin, and you can turn the handle to make the pointed thing put holes in the hard drives. It's much less work than crushing them.
Physical destruction is appropriate for used drives because they're really bad resources. Spinning disk drives are machines that wear out over time. They get a few thousand hours on them, and then they die.
I've measured the actual MTTF of drives that had published specs promising 300,000 hours MTTF. Of a population of 24 drives, I had 30% mortality within 60,000 hours (with somewhere near 25,000 being the mean.) That means we saw quite a bit less than the 300,000 promised hours. And these were the all-the-money high quality 15K RPM server drives, properly mounted in cooled systems, not the cheap consumer grade drives that were roasted in a cheap PC case. Old drives are a time-bomb with a very finite life.
New drives are down to $0.05 per gigabyte or less. They use less electricity than older drives, and have capacities far greater. And the machines aren't worn to within a few hours of the end of their useful life. It's false economy to think that old drives are worth saving. They're certainly not worth risking your data on.
If you're looking for fast production-line destruction, take a three pound hammer and punch. A punch driven through the aluminum plate covering the platter section, midway between the center spindle and the edge of the drive, down to the bottom of the case through the platters, will effectively destroy the disks. It will cheaply render the data unreadable to anyone who doesn't want to invest ten thousand dollars investigating the remains of the disks. You can crank through many disks per hour. A 3/8" bit in an electric drill would be similarly effective, and less labor intensive than a hammer, but slower.
Leaving the aluminum plate covering on the drive has the added advantage of containing the shards if the disk platters are made of glass. Even so, I'd wear leather gloves and use eye protection if I were physically destroying them this way.
But with 15 drives, it's just not that big of a job. Why make a big mess? Disassemble them. It takes about 10 minutes per drive, and it's both educational and fun. You can probably do it watching TV on the couch.
A miniature Torx driver set (T6-T9, available from Sears), a flat bladed screwdriver, a #2 Philips screwdriver, and a pocket knife is all I need to take most drives apart down to their components. Recover the voice coil driver magnets, they're always useful. Remove the circuit boards and recycle them as they were probably soldered with lead. Remove the platters from the spindles. To truly be rid of the data, you'll have to basically destroy the platters in a very hot fire. Heating them past their Curie point will completely destroy the data, leaving them totally unrecoverable; but that may require heat as high as 1500 degrees F. You won't get that on a stovetop.
There's a very well documented case of defacing meters. It's a good thing it was recorded on video, because the meter communications mesh afterwards, well, what we got here is... failure to communicate.
Just slightly off topic, but does anyone know of accredited universities that do graduate degrees online? A lot of people are working and can't do normal classes, but might still want to get a higher ed degree. I'm thinking both Masters and PhD here. Anyone know of respectable (mostly) online programs?
I'll vouch for Arizona State University's online graduate program. Most of the professors I had were excellent, some chatted freely and took an interest in me, or at least faked it well enough over email. They encouraged and fostered classroom chatter over the forums and message boards. Some tests were online, but I sat most tests locally with a proctor and a #2 pencil.
The classes were filmed during lectures presented to a classroom of students, so there was some student interaction there, but for the most part lectures were playback-only unless I emailed the prof a question. Turns out that is extremely convenient to someone with a full-time day job when the real-life emergencies crop up. There is no penalty for hitting "pause" in the middle of a lecture, saving up three lectures until the weekend, repeating a difficult passage to be sure it's understood, or for hitting the 2x speed button for those professors who think faster than they talk.
The only complaint I had were the extra fees I had to pay to take their courses online, which about doubled the cost of tuition. But for that price I also got an on-campus liaison who was able to take care of lots of the paperwork and stupid administrative stuff. I never had to fill out course registration forms or worry about full classrooms, and when the University sent me a notice saying I wouldn't be able to attend any more classes until I had proof of a measles vaccine (I'm 2,000 miles from campus, and viruses do not work that way!), they handled that kind of nonsense for me. It's good that they did that, but the cost was very high.
It was definitely a different experience from my on-campus undergraduate degree. And I can't really rank that difference in terms of "good" or "bad". But I don't feel cheated in any way by the experience, and I did get the education I was looking for.
Considering a near three-decade long history of Multi touch RnD (starting with University of Toronto, followed by Bell Labs and Xerox, et al...) a patent awarded to apple would be quite a spit in the face of everyone who made the technology possible in the first place.
Strangely enough, this story had nothing to do with patents at all. The only thing "patent" about it is the P in the USPTO acronym, but that's not what this is about. This is about the T, which is the Trademark portion of their office.
Not only did the summary say "trademark" but the article title even used the word "trademark." Feel free to yell about patents in context, but for now, this isn't it.
It should be easy to come up with a less-descriptive name. They could call it "Squidly", "Octie", "Starfish", or "Tentacular", something that makes people think of multi-touch creatures.
Or they could do it like companies did in the mid 20th century, by deliberately misspelling parts of the name: "Multy-Tuuch", "Mani-Fyngers", or "Repeat-O-Poke". Or maybe something more 90's, like "Apple Bob". In the 2000's Apple did a great job marketing the iFixing of nouns, so they could use something like "iSteve" or "iMultitouch" or "iShocker" (rule 34 dictated I had to place that one in here.) They could stick with the Apple theme and call it something like a "Granny Smith" or "Honey Crisp".
Anyway, there are lots of names they could trademark. They just have to pick one.
It's not like a postcard. This is actually more like entrapment. They didn't simply monitor his cell device, they actively asked it to betray him.
On its face it sounds similar to the police sending you a letter saying "Congratulations, Mr. networkBoy! You have won a cash prize of at least $10 from the 'Get What's Coming To You!' lottery! Show up at 123 Main St at noon on Friday the 13th to claim your prize, and be prepared to show a photo ID", paying you $10 for arriving and presenting your ID, bringing you to the "back room" to "process your award" and then applying the handcuffs while out of sight of the rest of the crowd. But there's a significant difference. You read the letter, you can make your own determination whether or not to believe the letter is legitimate, and you decide whether or not to show up. (By the way, I understand these police run reverse-scams have been extremely effective at rounding up lots of criminals.)
In this case, your cell phone will not evaluate the authenticity of the broadcast message, and it will not tell you "hey boss, I see a new cell tower, want me to talk to it?" It simply answers as it would any legitimate cell tower.
I don't know. I played with the WP "Mango" beta the other evening. Metro may not be as aesthetically pleasing as iOS but it was definitely an improvement in terms of integration of contacts, social media, and apps, and yet I could still see how to manage them separately.
In terms of appearance and functionality it was better than any Android phone I've played with.
I equated their appearance this way. WP8 is to Facebook as Android is to MySpace.
WP7 does not appear to be even distantly related to the old Windows Mobile 6.5 CE crap. They did a decent job with this one. (first impressions only so far, of course.)
Judging from the heat they produce, I think my cable boxes draw somewhere around 50 watt-hours each in "standby" mode. I need to plug my Kill-a-Watt in to doublecheck, though.
Those suckers emit the heat 24 x 7. I don't mind so much in the winter, but in the summer I'm paying extra to pump that heat out of the house.
Just found on line where someone measured theirs with a kill-a-watt and they draw 45 watt-hours in use, and 42 watt-hours in standby. Definitely not green.
DVR probably doesn't change the equation much at all. Yes, there are very few patterns to match if you say "let's watch for identical channel patterns to what is being broadcast right now." But real pattern matching could be used to match on subsets of the data: 30 seconds of programming at a time might yield enough information to narrow down a clip to a very finite subset, and preceding and following clips would eliminate collisions resulting in the identity of a particular show.
This technique would work on movies, regardless of their source being DVD, cable, or broadcast.
I'm with you, though, on the whole "negative impact/is this valuable" question. There are a lot of other bits of data we put into society that identify ourselves and our habits. Is this one going to be affordable enough to make a difference to the marketers? Will spies or law enforcement be able to use this as evidence against me? Is the risk of being monitored higher or lower than the cost of defending against it?
Back when Google Power was thinking about happening, I once figured out how a burglar could use the output of a smart electrical meter to determine usage patterns that would indicate homeowner occupancy. There would be a very characteristic double spike that would bracket a very common garage door opener's usage pattern -- when it's time to leave in the morning, the door would open causing a 30 second draw from the motor as well as a draw from the lights, after 30 seconds the motor would shut off but the lights would remain on, there would be a short period of time (less than about three minutes) while the car is driven away, followed by another 30 second motor draw, and five minutes after that the light timer would shut them off.
Any burglar could see that pattern, even on a background of noisy other appliances (such as refrigerators, dishwashers, timed bathroom fans, etc), because the draws are so big, much bigger than the TV picture changes. They would know exactly what happened. If family members left at different times, there would be a similar pattern for a fixed number of operations, and the burglar would simply have to wait until the last one, then would have a reasonable assurance the house was now empty.
Anyway, the security measure choices were limited: either waste more electricity to mask the issue using random energy consumers; smooth out the usage through storage and discharge mechanisms (like a UPS or capacitor); reduce the resolution of the meter by permitting aggregate readings only once every hour or so; or stop using the appliance.
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I think many people are in a situation similar to yours. You have existing hardware that suits your needs, and with no pressing new needs, you will continue to use it indefinitely. But all things change, eventually.
All those parts are interrelated. When it comes time to replace any one of those pieces, be it the car stereo, the car itself, the phone, the Zune, or possibly even the little FM transceiver, you're going to re-evaluate your stuff in terms of what you want to hang on to.
Note that replacing a cell phone will usually cost another service contract commitment, but nothing out of pocket. It's an easy choice for people to make. And I think today that pretty much all of the subsidized phones include MP3 players.
Fixing or replacing a broken Zune may cost $100.
Replacing a broken car stereo will cost $100 or more
Replacing a broken FM transmitter is about $40.
Replacing a broken car is a lot of money.
A reasonable person might say "I now have situation X. Getting a new phone would help me address it, and they're 'free'. And they all come with music players, so I don't have to carry separate device Y anymore? Sign me up!"
Are the free phone music player applications any good? Not the ones I've seen, but that's a different issue. If money is the primary issue, they may be the only option. If the Zune still works, and is so much better than the free phone app, you may continue to carry the separate device. But most people probably wouldn't repair or replace a broken Zune with another separate player, at least not anymore.
The iPad and tablet computing is still a different market, more related to eBooks and web surfing than music and phone calls. Maybe what you were thinking of is the iPod Touch, which seems like it's being rebranded as a sort of mini-tablet. But I don't know that the Touch will continue to be sold forever. It's too expensive to not be a phone. And it doesn't bring any of the advantages of a tablet.
But did you like it enough to carry a Zune plus a mobile phone? As soon as I got a phone that played music, I ditched the separate MP3 player, never to carry it again.
Zune's biggest problem here is that even modestly smart phones now cover the portable music playing needs of most people. The dedicated hardware was priced about the same as a smart phone without the phone, meaning as a consumer I could pay more for a lame phone and good music player, or I could buy an integrated device for less.
This was just Microsoft analyzing their cards and wisely folding their hand, as there are few winning scenarios in the music player market anymore. I suspect the iPod will likely suffer a similar fate, so it makes me wonder how long it will take Apple to come to the same conclusion?
I'm starting to see this problem in Google too. Google seems to be going off in a million different directions lately, with no apparent overarching plan.
Something recently has started to happen to counter this exact thing at Google. Someone high-up shut down Google Labs last month, and ended most of those projects. It was supposedly a part of renewing their focus on their core business. And while it often seems like Google's core business is "being cool", being cool doesn't exactly pay the bills, so I suppose they have to figure out more new things to generate revenue.
What are some of the million new directions you see coming out of Google?
I think the simplicity of Macs from the beginning was what inspired schools to use them, particularly for junior grade kids. It wasn't just a case of the money.
The history of Apple getting into schools is long and nowhere near that simple. It was a case of money, time to market, competition, inertia, vendor lock-in, and possibly corruption (depending on how you define it.) And yes, simplicity was a factor.
Apple made deals with school systems to purchase Apple ][ back in the late 1970s, and got them in schools long before IBM arrived with the IBM PC. Being older, they were cheaper and less capable, but because they were the first exposure to computers for a lot of kids, those kids fell in love with them. And it happened long before Macintosh came on the scene. When the IBM PC came around, Apples were already in many schools.
I remember a discussion with my dad in 1979, where I thought that Apple was going to be the primary computers at work too, because they were already so widespread in schools. Having seen IBM's corporate marketers in action, he said "you have no idea how IBM's marketing team works. When IBM enters the market, they are going to completely dominate it. They play hardball." And he was absolutely right.
Then came the PC. IBM's market strategy for the PCs was simple: target the Big Corporations of America, because they have big budgets and lots of IBM hardware already, and IBM was interested in their higher price tags and huge volumes. IBM had done business this way for decades, and were really, really good at it. Sure, they wanted to sell to the home market, but it wasn't their primary focus. The idea was to get PCs in front of everyone at work in hopes they'd go home and buy a PC for home use. IBM PCs remained the choice for Corporate America, mostly because their IBM reps sold them the PCs as "business" machines instead of those Apple "toys". IBM had long been telling their corporate customers "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", back when IBM's primary threat were the mainframe clones by companies like Amdahl. They continued to repeat it to sell the PCs. And IBM sales forces had golden measures of persuasion. (Let's just say you really missed something if you never personally witnessed it.) And here, IBM won, hands down. PCs absolutely dominated the corporate market.
But the home market wasn't that simple. Lots of homes had kids who wanted Apples like they had in school, so there was a divide between Mom and Dad, and Junior and Sis. Not really seeing much of a difference for themselves, many parents went with Apples at the recommendation of their kids. Remember, at the time, buying home computers was completely new territory for families, and these were very big ticket items for most people. From this, the marketplace learned that education was a driver of primary importance for making computer purchase decisions at home.
When IBM realized they weren't dominating the home market, they applied their business experience and figured it was price point. They introduced the PC Jr. It bombed, because it turned out that the price wasn't the dominant factor. It was a very confusing time for them, especially as the clones entered the market about this same time. They came out with the XT, and the AT, and while businesses were buying them, home users were less interested. For one of the first times in their history, IBM was out of their element.
Later, as the first Macs arrived, the school districts who had contracts with Apple saw them primarily as an upgrade, even though they were an entirely new architecture. The concept of a graphical OS was certainly part of the sale, but I'd bet most of it was inertia - we bought from Apple last year, we'll buy from them again this year. (School board members are elected officials, and are certainly not hired based on intelligence.) Nothing wrong with it, but again, Apple was courting them as heavily as they could while IBM remained focused on the businesses who h
Just to be clear, the parent post means digital prints on photographic paper, and not just ink-jet prints on Epson paper. Photographic paper processes, dyes, and chemistry are fairly well understood, and their lifetimes have been tested in terms of actual years, under many types of storage conditions.
I know that most older ink jet inks degraded fairly quickly even in the best of conditions, and wasn't expected to last for any serious length of time. Some photo printing technologies are better than others. I've heard dye sublimation was tested and shown to be pretty stable, but I've never used it. But I'd check for newer studies too, as these things are being measured all the time. Manufacturers change ink formulations, papers, nozzle technology, etc. It's always different.
If you're destroying drives on your own, go for it. But in any kind of business, even if you don't have some old motherboard with an IDE connector, it's worth spending the $20 on an adapter or card to just DBAN those crappy old drives.
Why? Solely to prevent someone from injuring themselves while destroying old hard drives with a drill, which is bad in itself. It's worse when they bill the company for the ER visit because a spark gets in their eye. It gets even worse when they go on perfectly collectible workers comp and settle a lawsuit because they weren't given safety goggles when they did so.
Absolutely not. If you're in business, what you need most is solid evidence that your data is destroyed.
You can hand a laborer a hammer and punch, safety glasses, and a pair of gloves, and say "here is a pallet of disks: hammer the punch in here until you see this metal down here bulge out. Repeat until this pallet is empty." You say to his supervisor, "We have given him a pallet containing 327 hard drives to destroy. Here is a clipboard with their serial numbers. Check each drive to make sure the damage shows a hole here and a bulge in this spot, then tick this box for each destroyed drive. Once every drive is properly damaged, sign this form attesting to the destruction, then ship the pallet to this recycling center. Your task is finished when every drive is destroyed and accounted for, you've signed the form, and the pallet is on the truck."
You can't easily look at a disk and see if it contains sensitive data or not. You can't easily look at a disk and see if it's wiped. You can pick up a disk from the not-wiped pile and place it in the wiped pile, and nobody will notice. You can make a mistake that ships your company's sensitive data off to some eBay buyer. But you can very easily look at a chunk of metal and assure yourself it's properly damaged. You won't set the damaged disk in the wrong pile. You can't pass off an undamaged disk as a damaged disk. And nobody can accidentally recover the data from a properly damaged disk.
And the reason this is important is simple economics. If you're reselling the disks for $10 bucks each, the most you could make is $3270. If you failed to wipe out the wrong disk, you might be putting your customers credit card or social security numbers or drivers' licenses out into the wild. The repercussions from such a mistake can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of credit repairs and lawsuits. If you're destroying the disks, you will spend a few dollars destroying them and trucking them to the recycling center, but about the most risk you take on is the guy could injure himself.
300,000 hrs = 34.2 years! You might want to double check the specs. I'm betting the 300,000 hrs is MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), which is not directly related to MTTF. MTBF = (total # failures)/(total # hrs). FYI,
The figure of 300,000 hours appears to be based on running 100 disks for one year and counting 3 failures, instead of trying to run ten disks for 100 years and noting they generally fail in year 34. And that is the reason I don't believe published specs can properly reflect the real lifetime of a single hard disk.
The difference between Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) and Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) describes the methodology of the study, and says more about the type of product than the measurement. MTTF is measured when the clock is stopped when a unit fails. MTBF is measured for a fixed duration, with failed units repaired. Expensive items that are easy to repair are better measured in MTBF; while cheap, disposable, hard-to-repair items are better measured in MTTF. Hard drives typically fall under the latter category, as they're viewed as one of the repair components for a more expensive item (the computer system) which is probably measured in MTBF.
Because of the limitations of the testing methodology, neither MTTF nor MTBF provides a meaningful number for a single unit. The problem is that they express reliability in terms of a line based on just a few early data points, but we all know that the real hard disk lifetime plots out as the infamous Bathtub Curve. Think about it in terms of explaining these concepts to a manager who is about to sign a contract for 10,000 drives. He just wants to know if he can expect ten failures every month or one failure every year. It's a simplification because most people don't want to incorporate the bathtub curve into a contract, and because the vendors have to get the drives out on the market long before they can complete an actual test for the drive lifetime.
As I said further below, most old drives are not worth salvaging. Sure, modern drives are more energy efficient, faster, have higher storage capacities, but those are attributes that don't matter to a lot of still-useful applications. The problem with old hard drives is that the mechanisms are worn. They have a finite lifetime. A large number of inexpensive hard drives won't last more than four years or so. Do you really want to go to the work of salvaging, erasing, and installing an old drive in a new box, just to have that drive fail in the next three or six months?
I remove the magnets from their steel keepers. Most are glued on with an adhesive designed only to keep them in place, not to hold them together. By using a pocket knife or utility razor as a wedge, and a plastic screwdriver handle as a light hammer, most magnets can easily be removed with little or no damage.
But it turned out to be dangerous in two ways, the lesser of which was hammering a sharpened knife blade. I stacked the harvested raw magnets into two-inch-thick stacks (perhaps a dozen magnets each.) Each stack then has an extremely powerful field, the kind that is almost impossible to pull straight apart with ordinary muscle strength. Having two large stacks separated by a surprisingly large distance (a foot apart on the workbench top) is not always enough, and if they overcome the friction of the surface the stacks can slam together with both high force and high velocity. They will crush flesh and bone.
When I worked as a Data Security Tech we formatted them with 1's and 0's 7 times before crushing them with a drill press. NO ONE could recover that data.
You crushed them with a drill press? Here's a tip: the switch on the drill press makes the pointed thing spin, and you can turn the handle to make the pointed thing put holes in the hard drives. It's much less work than crushing them.
high temperature destroys the magnetic field.
Your oven goes to 1500 degrees? What the hell are you baking in it, ceramics?
Physical destruction is appropriate for used drives because they're really bad resources. Spinning disk drives are machines that wear out over time. They get a few thousand hours on them, and then they die.
I've measured the actual MTTF of drives that had published specs promising 300,000 hours MTTF. Of a population of 24 drives, I had 30% mortality within 60,000 hours (with somewhere near 25,000 being the mean.) That means we saw quite a bit less than the 300,000 promised hours. And these were the all-the-money high quality 15K RPM server drives, properly mounted in cooled systems, not the cheap consumer grade drives that were roasted in a cheap PC case. Old drives are a time-bomb with a very finite life.
New drives are down to $0.05 per gigabyte or less. They use less electricity than older drives, and have capacities far greater. And the machines aren't worn to within a few hours of the end of their useful life. It's false economy to think that old drives are worth saving. They're certainly not worth risking your data on.
If you're looking for fast production-line destruction, take a three pound hammer and punch. A punch driven through the aluminum plate covering the platter section, midway between the center spindle and the edge of the drive, down to the bottom of the case through the platters, will effectively destroy the disks. It will cheaply render the data unreadable to anyone who doesn't want to invest ten thousand dollars investigating the remains of the disks. You can crank through many disks per hour. A 3/8" bit in an electric drill would be similarly effective, and less labor intensive than a hammer, but slower.
Leaving the aluminum plate covering on the drive has the added advantage of containing the shards if the disk platters are made of glass. Even so, I'd wear leather gloves and use eye protection if I were physically destroying them this way.
But with 15 drives, it's just not that big of a job. Why make a big mess? Disassemble them. It takes about 10 minutes per drive, and it's both educational and fun. You can probably do it watching TV on the couch.
A miniature Torx driver set (T6-T9, available from Sears), a flat bladed screwdriver, a #2 Philips screwdriver, and a pocket knife is all I need to take most drives apart down to their components. Recover the voice coil driver magnets, they're always useful. Remove the circuit boards and recycle them as they were probably soldered with lead. Remove the platters from the spindles. To truly be rid of the data, you'll have to basically destroy the platters in a very hot fire. Heating them past their Curie point will completely destroy the data, leaving them totally unrecoverable; but that may require heat as high as 1500 degrees F. You won't get that on a stovetop.
There's a very well documented case of defacing meters. It's a good thing it was recorded on video, because the meter communications mesh afterwards, well, what we got here is ... failure to communicate.
The Apple trademark lawyers in this instance were either very stupid, very lazy, or very self-interested. ;)
Would you settle for "very rich"?
Actually, that's what sets you apart from them. They wouldn't settle for merely "very rich", which is why they're now "filthy rich".
Just slightly off topic, but does anyone know of accredited universities that do graduate degrees online? A lot of people are working and can't do normal classes, but might still want to get a higher ed degree. I'm thinking both Masters and PhD here. Anyone know of respectable (mostly) online programs?
I'll vouch for Arizona State University's online graduate program. Most of the professors I had were excellent, some chatted freely and took an interest in me, or at least faked it well enough over email. They encouraged and fostered classroom chatter over the forums and message boards. Some tests were online, but I sat most tests locally with a proctor and a #2 pencil.
The classes were filmed during lectures presented to a classroom of students, so there was some student interaction there, but for the most part lectures were playback-only unless I emailed the prof a question. Turns out that is extremely convenient to someone with a full-time day job when the real-life emergencies crop up. There is no penalty for hitting "pause" in the middle of a lecture, saving up three lectures until the weekend, repeating a difficult passage to be sure it's understood, or for hitting the 2x speed button for those professors who think faster than they talk.
The only complaint I had were the extra fees I had to pay to take their courses online, which about doubled the cost of tuition. But for that price I also got an on-campus liaison who was able to take care of lots of the paperwork and stupid administrative stuff. I never had to fill out course registration forms or worry about full classrooms, and when the University sent me a notice saying I wouldn't be able to attend any more classes until I had proof of a measles vaccine (I'm 2,000 miles from campus, and viruses do not work that way!), they handled that kind of nonsense for me. It's good that they did that, but the cost was very high.
It was definitely a different experience from my on-campus undergraduate degree. And I can't really rank that difference in terms of "good" or "bad". But I don't feel cheated in any way by the experience, and I did get the education I was looking for.
Considering a near three-decade long history of Multi touch RnD (starting with University of Toronto, followed by Bell Labs and Xerox, et al...) a patent awarded to apple would be quite a spit in the face of everyone who made the technology possible in the first place.
Strangely enough, this story had nothing to do with patents at all. The only thing "patent" about it is the P in the USPTO acronym, but that's not what this is about. This is about the T, which is the Trademark portion of their office.
Not only did the summary say "trademark" but the article title even used the word "trademark." Feel free to yell about patents in context, but for now, this isn't it.
It should be easy to come up with a less-descriptive name. They could call it "Squidly", "Octie", "Starfish", or "Tentacular", something that makes people think of multi-touch creatures.
Or they could do it like companies did in the mid 20th century, by deliberately misspelling parts of the name: "Multy-Tuuch", "Mani-Fyngers", or "Repeat-O-Poke". Or maybe something more 90's, like "Apple Bob". In the 2000's Apple did a great job marketing the iFixing of nouns, so they could use something like "iSteve" or "iMultitouch" or "iShocker" (rule 34 dictated I had to place that one in here.) They could stick with the Apple theme and call it something like a "Granny Smith" or "Honey Crisp".
Anyway, there are lots of names they could trademark. They just have to pick one.
OK, here goes: "Two Irishmen walked out of a bar..."
What? It could happen!
It's not like a postcard. This is actually more like entrapment. They didn't simply monitor his cell device, they actively asked it to betray him.
On its face it sounds similar to the police sending you a letter saying "Congratulations, Mr. networkBoy! You have won a cash prize of at least $10 from the 'Get What's Coming To You!' lottery! Show up at 123 Main St at noon on Friday the 13th to claim your prize, and be prepared to show a photo ID", paying you $10 for arriving and presenting your ID, bringing you to the "back room" to "process your award" and then applying the handcuffs while out of sight of the rest of the crowd. But there's a significant difference. You read the letter, you can make your own determination whether or not to believe the letter is legitimate, and you decide whether or not to show up. (By the way, I understand these police run reverse-scams have been extremely effective at rounding up lots of criminals.)
In this case, your cell phone will not evaluate the authenticity of the broadcast message, and it will not tell you "hey boss, I see a new cell tower, want me to talk to it?" It simply answers as it would any legitimate cell tower.
Oh, I still have my iPhone tucked in my pocket. There wasn't enough temptation to replace it. But it was surprisingly close.
I don't know. I played with the WP "Mango" beta the other evening. Metro may not be as aesthetically pleasing as iOS but it was definitely an improvement in terms of integration of contacts, social media, and apps, and yet I could still see how to manage them separately.
In terms of appearance and functionality it was better than any Android phone I've played with.
I equated their appearance this way. WP8 is to Facebook as Android is to MySpace.
WP7 does not appear to be even distantly related to the old Windows Mobile 6.5 CE crap. They did a decent job with this one. (first impressions only so far, of course.)
Judging from the heat they produce, I think my cable boxes draw somewhere around 50 watt-hours each in "standby" mode. I need to plug my Kill-a-Watt in to doublecheck, though.
Those suckers emit the heat 24 x 7. I don't mind so much in the winter, but in the summer I'm paying extra to pump that heat out of the house.
Just found on line where someone measured theirs with a kill-a-watt and they draw 45 watt-hours in use, and 42 watt-hours in standby. Definitely not green.
DVR probably doesn't change the equation much at all. Yes, there are very few patterns to match if you say "let's watch for identical channel patterns to what is being broadcast right now." But real pattern matching could be used to match on subsets of the data: 30 seconds of programming at a time might yield enough information to narrow down a clip to a very finite subset, and preceding and following clips would eliminate collisions resulting in the identity of a particular show.
This technique would work on movies, regardless of their source being DVD, cable, or broadcast.
I'm with you, though, on the whole "negative impact/is this valuable" question. There are a lot of other bits of data we put into society that identify ourselves and our habits. Is this one going to be affordable enough to make a difference to the marketers? Will spies or law enforcement be able to use this as evidence against me? Is the risk of being monitored higher or lower than the cost of defending against it?
Back when Google Power was thinking about happening, I once figured out how a burglar could use the output of a smart electrical meter to determine usage patterns that would indicate homeowner occupancy. There would be a very characteristic double spike that would bracket a very common garage door opener's usage pattern -- when it's time to leave in the morning, the door would open causing a 30 second draw from the motor as well as a draw from the lights, after 30 seconds the motor would shut off but the lights would remain on, there would be a short period of time (less than about three minutes) while the car is driven away, followed by another 30 second motor draw, and five minutes after that the light timer would shut them off.
Any burglar could see that pattern, even on a background of noisy other appliances (such as refrigerators, dishwashers, timed bathroom fans, etc), because the draws are so big, much bigger than the TV picture changes. They would know exactly what happened. If family members left at different times, there would be a similar pattern for a fixed number of operations, and the burglar would simply have to wait until the last one, then would have a reasonable assurance the house was now empty.
Anyway, the security measure choices were limited: either waste more electricity to mask the issue using random energy consumers; smooth out the usage through storage and discharge mechanisms (like a UPS or capacitor); reduce the resolution of the meter by permitting aggregate readings only once every hour or so; or stop using the appliance.
The same choices still apply.