Except in this application you can be unconcerned with precise regulation of temperature. Whether it hits 260C or 300C or 500C is irrelevant, as long as it's maintained above the Curie temperature for the required duration.
Of course you'd have to know the chemical composition of the media before committing to destruction at a certain temperature. What if the platter wasn't coated with Fe(2)Nd?
At work the standard we gave our service vendor for destroying failed drives involved a drill press and epoxy. We're concerned about data thieves, not Three Letter Agencies.
For my personal drives at home, I just use a three pound hammer. A scraped, smashed and warped platter hitting the trash bin is effectively unreadable, and all I'm really concerned about is a bad guy finding bank account information. If someone official really wanted a working drive of mine, pajama-clad ninjas would probably come for it in the middle of the day while I was at work anyway.
Well if you read the text you can see that it is not because of low ratings...
I did read the text, thank you very much, and it read exactly like the "He resigned to pursue other opportunities" kind of lie that a corporation tells when they fire the CEO's ass.
I know that very few people walk away from a profitable enterprise. If the only problem is truly overwork and it's making metric butt-loads of money, you add staff to ease the pressure and you continue to make money. And if we're talking about a TV show not making money, it's probably due to low ratings.
I like this idea a lot, but who will "pay" for the service? Running a CA does cost money -- you've got to pay someone to answer the certificate requests, for example. And unless that CA is doing some kind of research on the submitters of the add-ons, the quality assurance is no different than what we get from Verisign's level 3.
A certificate won't guarantee quality, it's just supposed to guarantee that we can hunt down the person to whom it was issued. Verisign doesn't offer that unless you get to their level 2 (or level 4, or whatever their certification levels mean.) The only thing Verisign's credit-card verification offers is the assurance that whoever created object FOO has the same signature as whoever created object BAR (and that once upon a time they had a working credit card number with $14.95 to spare.) For extension updates (and to defeat this problem) that just might be good enough.
Does this demonstrate the Brits have just as poor popular support for good sci-fi as the Americans?:-( That's too bad, because I always held you blokes in higher regard than that...
This news is really too bad. This show is one of the best sci-fi remakes I can remember, in terms of remaining faithful to the original series while not sucking out loud the way shows like "Star Drek: Voyager" did. I mean I really like the new Battlestar Galactica, but other than keeping a handful of names and a very basic plot premise, they are two wildly different shows. Watching this current Dr. Who is just like watching the old show (only with slightly-less-cheesey special effects.)
That was the commenter's point, going straight over your head.
Does this look like NASCAR to you?
Yes.
Oh, wait, I see the difference now. Indy 500 is "Go fast, turn left, winner drinks Champagne." But NASCAR is "Go fast, turn left, winner drinks Budweiser."
Maybe we should just stick with the lame driver jokes.
Modern cars are not designed with 100-year-warranties in mind - they are designed to be cheap and disposable.
Modern cars are a vast improvement over every automobile that have gone before them, if you look at it from an overall point of view.
Safety? There is no question that a modern car is far more safe than anything produced before -- air bags, seat belts, passenger compartment design, crumple zones, and computer simulated crash testing allows for thousands and thousands of accidents to be analyzed. ABS brakes improve stopping distances. Suspensions, steering and handling are all designed to give maximum control under a wide variety of driving conditions.
Efficiencies? Electronic fuel injection under computer control delivers exactly the correct amount of fuel for the current speed and power load of the engine. Aerodynamic design reduces drag on every vehicle designed from sports cars to Mack trucks. Computer modeling of the ignition chamber helps design cylinder heads and piston shapes to ensure maximum power output for a minimum amount of fuel.
Pollution? For starters, improving fuel efficiency means burning less fuel. O2 sensors drive systems that reburn waste gases. Catalytic converters help destroy some of the major pollutants.
Weight? Advances in metallurgy and engineering help shave every possible pound off most vehicles, improving mileage. The less mass you have to move, the less energy it takes to move it.
Reliability? Advances in design and CNC machining allow for tighter tolerances. Parts are routinely made today to tolerances of.0005 inches, whereas their older counterparts were made to only.005 inch tolerances. The previous amount of slop made for vibrations and premature wear. The older the car, the more often you had to take it in for scheduled maintenance. Some modern cars aren't scheduled for their first tune-up for 100,000 miles, whereas the cars of the 50s and 60s were ready for the junkyard by 100,000 miles. Advances in coatings and paint ensure the car body will remain rust free far longer than its antique counterparts.
Cost? The Model T cost more than the average annual wages of its era. The average car of the 1960s cost roughly the average annual wages of an American wage earner. An average car today costs less than half the average American's annual salary.
So what's the downside? Complexity. On board computers are used to control everything from ignition timing to the dome lights. Some carmakers will void your warranty if you so much as change your own oil for those first 100,000 miles. But that complexity does not mean reliability is necessarily reduced, it just means more testing is required to ensure they all work together. And computer simulations allow for an awful lot of virtual testing to go on before a car even hits the factory floor.
While current cars may not have the "charm" of a Brighton Run champ, I'd trust a cheap modern Ford to get me to work on a daily basis a lot more than I'd trust anything made 20 or more years ago. Anecdotal evidence of the survival of a handful of smoky, dangerous machines having an abnormally long life does little to convince me that old cars are "better". It proves only that a handful of dedicated car enthusiasts can keep anything running if they spend enough money.
1. Universal remotes. Great idea in theory, but they're often hard as hell to program, especially after you lose the programming guide. Even when they're programmed correctly, they still can't perform some important function that the original remote can, so you end up having to keep both of them around, which defeats the purpose of the universal remote.
The Harmony remotes by Logitech solve this problem *completely*. You don't program them directly, you use their web page to pick what components you have, and then it walks you through filling out some use cases! It figures out from your list that you have a TV, a cable box and a DVD player/audio amplifier. It then figures you'll probably want to have the sound system on while you watch cable TV, so it prompts you to tell it which input you select to listen to the audio. It asks a few other questions, but that's pretty much it for setup. Then, it transmits (via USB) all the commands and setup to your remote. The "Watch Cable TV" button powers on all three devices. The number buttons are automatically mapped to change channels on the cable box. The volume buttons crank the amplifier up and down. Everything just works automagically.
Plus, the remote keeps track of state. If you are watching cable, then hit the "Watch a DVD" button, the cable box is turned off, the TV input is set to your DVD input, and the disc starts playing. The number buttons are remapped to send commands to the DVD player instead of the cable box.
If things get out of sync, you hit the help button and it prompts you through a series of simple questions, sending IRs until everything works. If you just have to do something manually, you can hit the "device" button and every button from your original remote is available. And finally, you can set up all kinds of extra things manually via their web site.
I've installed a few systems with these remotes, and I own two myself.
Two drawbacks. The first is price: $200+ is a bit much for some people. But once they see one in action, they suddenly become a "must have". The other drawback is the crappy recharging cradle. It's all soft and rounded, making it hard to line up the remote. And it's got a giant glowing blue circle that'll light up a room; the remote mostly blocks the light when it's seated but it still glows evilly. And the contacts corrode a bit over time, and the remote beeps and flashes every time power is connected. A more robust charging mechanism would be greatly appreciated.
Of course, I think Pogue suggested that microwaves should have a barcode reader, and food packaging should have barcodes that provide cooking instructions.
Target used to sell the Beyond microwave oven by Westinghouse. It just used the ordinary UPC barcode on the food and looked up the cooking time for that food in its database. It could also learn your cooking times for whatever barcodes you fed it. But they screwed up the user design by making the barcode reader a wand-type instead of a grid scanner. You had to actually take the reader out of its pocket and swipe it across the barcode manually -- how gauche. I mean if you're going to be too lazy to read the side of the food packet and punch 2-0-0-start, what makes them think you'll want to pick up a wand?
Well, you won't get it fixed by buying another Motorola. They still do the exact same sucky thing today.
I've even went to the Motorola hacker sites and loaded new firmware into the machine, trying to disable those buttons.
One suggestion that's sort-of worked for me is to "lock" the volume changes. Go into Settings / Security / Lock Application. Navigate down to Settings / Audio and lock it. Now, when you try to change the volume while the clamshell is closed, it prompts you to enter the unlock code (I think the default is 1234.) If you don't want to change it, press Cancel, and you can still use the phone. You can also change the ring volume while the clamshell is open, just not when it's closed.
It's a stupid workaround to a stupider problem, but it might help you a bit.
I bought a Netgear router for a family member. It came in a white plastic housing with clear inserts along the edges and in a logo-circle on the top (vaguely iMac looking.) The entire box is filled with blue LEDs, including a ring of seven around that inner circle, and looks like a cheesy UFO landing pad designed to keep enemy epileptics at a safe distance. I felt bad buying such a gaudy looking device for this person, but it had the features I was looking for at the right price point. I figured I could hide it away behind a cabinet where she'd never see it.
Unpacked it at her house, and what do you know? There's a hardware switch to turn the LEDs off, right on the case! Now that was a conveniently useful button.
At least with Nokia you could change the "emergency call number" to something else via the menus. If you picked "911" (the American emergency number) then at least your phone wouldn't let you accidentally call "000". It still works to call "000" in an emergency, but your phone wouldn't give you all this "help" like "Attempting emergency call" or allow anything but 911 it to be dialed while the keypad is locked. I think you can even completely disable the emergency call number, which would truly lock your whole keypad the way you want it.
Far worse is any modern Motorola phone. I seriously despise the Motorola software. They've obviously never tested it under any actual use conditions, or watched any users with a brain try to navigate or use their crapware.
I have the V3 RAZR (ok, not that new anymore, but their new offerings suffer from the same problems) and it's a flip-open style. When I close the phone, I expect the keys to lock. Well, I do, but not Motorola. There are four unlabeled buttons on the edges of the phone that are still active. Two change the ring volume. One starts voice dialing and matches any random ambient sound to someone in my list. There's another button that I have no idea what it does, nor do I care. I just want them off.
All the belt pouches I've found have giant gaping holes allowing convenient access to the buttons while in the pouch. My coat presses them. My seat-belt buckle presses them. A pen sticking up out of my pocket presses them. Sometimes they'll shift the ring volume to silent, causing me to miss calls. Other times they'll crank it up to embarrassingly loud levels just in time for a meeting.
OK, so I figure I'll go into the menus and disable them. No luck -- I can rearrange everything on a menu I don't care about; I can disable network switching even though I use only one; I can turn on and off all kinds of things that are of no use to me. But I can't shut off those accursed outside buttons! Even after spending a month on the cell phone hacking forums, downloading new firmware, picking new options, nothing. It still wants to autodial someone whose name sounds very much like a seat-belt click.
What part of "disable those buttons" is so goddamn hard for Motorola to understand?
A couple of years ago I gave my father-in-law an ordinary DVD player, and burned DVDs of thousands of his photographic slides. That year DVD players were like $60 at Target (they're much cheaper now.) In subsequent years I burned more DVDs of more of his slides, and gave those as presents to him and the rest of the family.
That said, I have an old Ziga digital frame on my desk. The resolution is crappy and the colors are awful, and I have to burn my pics to a CF card, but I still like having it. Every time I look up I see a new picture, and I don't have to do anything to keep it running. I almost never take the DVD of family slides and load that up. (OK, never.)
I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, but it's not too difficult at all for a thief to turn a credit card number into products or cash. There are various laundering procedures that some people go through (Dateline's "To Catch An I.D. Thief" exposed an elaborate one) but the sad reality is that most one-off fraudulent purchases aren't even followed up on by the banks, not until the dollars pile up. (They will be tabulated, of course, and people who try using a dozen stolen cards and have the merchandise shipped to the same address do get picked up.)
Card data can also be turned into products in most stores. The stolen info can be burned on to an expired card, and the thief anonymously walks out of a store with an HDTV. More clever thieves will go to a store that's out of their norm, one that doesn't see as much fraud -- perhaps a craft store or a furniture store -- and buy a bunch of merchandise, and resell it on the streets or at flea markets. There are sophisticated organized theft rings that will purchase certain kinds of stolen merchandise and pose as legitimate wholesalers that resell it to small merchants.
The underground economy revolving around stolen merchandise and credit cards is rapidly approaching a hundred billion dollars annually in America alone (last figure I saw a year or two ago put the estimate over 60 billion, not counting the MAFIAA.) It's obviously pretty easy to do, if you think like a criminal.
Here's the worst-case nightmare task of any speech engine: the Anguish Languish
When I was a kid, my grandmother had clipped Ladle Rat Rotten Hut from the local newspaper, and my dad and I thought it was hilarious. Every so often, one of us would quote something like "water bag icer gut". A friend recently told me about the book (I didn't know it was a book), and google turned up the above page.
Maybe the problem is that lawmakers simply don't understand that software is not an analog to the real world. [...] Or maybe, just maybe, non-technical people are so used to being explained things in terms of analogy they tend to lose sight of the fact that simply because an analogy is the most useful or expedient method of explaining a concept the concept itself isn't bound by the realities an analogy might suggest.
So if I understand you correctly, software patents should be treated like soft wax sculptures that don't last very long, but hardware patents are more like durable cast iron hammers. That means we can melt software patents into candles, using them for lighting and ending the energy crisis, while we can use hardware patents to pound legal textbooks into pulpwood to burn for heat, ending the energy crisis. Both end up solving the energy crisis, so shouldn't we treat them the same?
Slashdot Mirror
I know you were being funny, but the author of the story is a lawyer who was doing some research, and not a Daily Tech staff writer.
Of course you'd have to know the chemical composition of the media before committing to destruction at a certain temperature. What if the platter wasn't coated with Fe(2)Nd?
For my personal drives at home, I just use a three pound hammer. A scraped, smashed and warped platter hitting the trash bin is effectively unreadable, and all I'm really concerned about is a bad guy finding bank account information. If someone official really wanted a working drive of mine, pajama-clad ninjas would probably come for it in the middle of the day while I was at work anyway.
I know that very few people walk away from a profitable enterprise. If the only problem is truly overwork and it's making metric butt-loads of money, you add staff to ease the pressure and you continue to make money. And if we're talking about a TV show not making money, it's probably due to low ratings.
A certificate won't guarantee quality, it's just supposed to guarantee that we can hunt down the person to whom it was issued. Verisign doesn't offer that unless you get to their level 2 (or level 4, or whatever their certification levels mean.) The only thing Verisign's credit-card verification offers is the assurance that whoever created object FOO has the same signature as whoever created object BAR (and that once upon a time they had a working credit card number with $14.95 to spare.) For extension updates (and to defeat this problem) that just might be good enough.
This news is really too bad. This show is one of the best sci-fi remakes I can remember, in terms of remaining faithful to the original series while not sucking out loud the way shows like "Star Drek: Voyager" did. I mean I really like the new Battlestar Galactica, but other than keeping a handful of names and a very basic plot premise, they are two wildly different shows. Watching this current Dr. Who is just like watching the old show (only with slightly-less-cheesey special effects.)
It's Vista. ALL the pedals are brake pedals.
Shows what I know.
That was the commenter's point, going straight over your head.
Yes.Oh, wait, I see the difference now. Indy 500 is "Go fast, turn left, winner drinks Champagne." But NASCAR is "Go fast, turn left, winner drinks Budweiser."
Maybe we should just stick with the lame driver jokes.
-
Safety? There is no question that a modern car is far more safe than anything produced before -- air bags, seat belts, passenger compartment design, crumple zones, and computer simulated crash testing allows for thousands and thousands of accidents to be analyzed. ABS brakes improve stopping distances. Suspensions, steering and handling are all designed to give maximum control under a wide variety of driving conditions.
- Efficiencies? Electronic fuel injection under computer control delivers exactly the correct amount of fuel for the current speed and power load of the engine. Aerodynamic design reduces drag on every vehicle designed from sports cars to Mack trucks. Computer modeling of the ignition chamber helps design cylinder heads and piston shapes to ensure maximum power output for a minimum amount of fuel.
- Pollution? For starters, improving fuel efficiency means burning less fuel. O2 sensors drive systems that reburn waste gases. Catalytic converters help destroy some of the major pollutants.
- Weight? Advances in metallurgy and engineering help shave every possible pound off most vehicles, improving mileage. The less mass you have to move, the less energy it takes to move it.
- Reliability? Advances in design and CNC machining allow for tighter tolerances. Parts are routinely made today to tolerances of
.0005 inches, whereas their older counterparts were made to only .005 inch tolerances. The previous amount of slop made for vibrations and premature wear. The older the car, the more often you had to take it in for scheduled maintenance. Some modern cars aren't scheduled for their first tune-up for 100,000 miles, whereas the cars of the 50s and 60s were ready for the junkyard by 100,000 miles. Advances in coatings and paint ensure the car body will remain rust free far longer than its antique counterparts.
- Cost? The Model T cost more than the average annual wages of its era. The average car of the 1960s cost roughly the average annual wages of an American wage earner. An average car today costs less than half the average American's annual salary.
So what's the downside? Complexity. On board computers are used to control everything from ignition timing to the dome lights. Some carmakers will void your warranty if you so much as change your own oil for those first 100,000 miles. But that complexity does not mean reliability is necessarily reduced, it just means more testing is required to ensure they all work together. And computer simulations allow for an awful lot of virtual testing to go on before a car even hits the factory floor.While current cars may not have the "charm" of a Brighton Run champ, I'd trust a cheap modern Ford to get me to work on a daily basis a lot more than I'd trust anything made 20 or more years ago. Anecdotal evidence of the survival of a handful of smoky, dangerous machines having an abnormally long life does little to convince me that old cars are "better". It proves only that a handful of dedicated car enthusiasts can keep anything running if they spend enough money.
The Harmony remotes by Logitech solve this problem *completely*. You don't program them directly, you use their web page to pick what components you have, and then it walks you through filling out some use cases! It figures out from your list that you have a TV, a cable box and a DVD player/audio amplifier. It then figures you'll probably want to have the sound system on while you watch cable TV, so it prompts you to tell it which input you select to listen to the audio. It asks a few other questions, but that's pretty much it for setup. Then, it transmits (via USB) all the commands and setup to your remote. The "Watch Cable TV" button powers on all three devices. The number buttons are automatically mapped to change channels on the cable box. The volume buttons crank the amplifier up and down. Everything just works automagically.
Plus, the remote keeps track of state. If you are watching cable, then hit the "Watch a DVD" button, the cable box is turned off, the TV input is set to your DVD input, and the disc starts playing. The number buttons are remapped to send commands to the DVD player instead of the cable box.
If things get out of sync, you hit the help button and it prompts you through a series of simple questions, sending IRs until everything works. If you just have to do something manually, you can hit the "device" button and every button from your original remote is available. And finally, you can set up all kinds of extra things manually via their web site.
I've installed a few systems with these remotes, and I own two myself.
Two drawbacks. The first is price: $200+ is a bit much for some people. But once they see one in action, they suddenly become a "must have". The other drawback is the crappy recharging cradle. It's all soft and rounded, making it hard to line up the remote. And it's got a giant glowing blue circle that'll light up a room; the remote mostly blocks the light when it's seated but it still glows evilly. And the contacts corrode a bit over time, and the remote beeps and flashes every time power is connected. A more robust charging mechanism would be greatly appreciated.
-- Alice Kahn
Target used to sell the Beyond microwave oven by Westinghouse. It just used the ordinary UPC barcode on the food and looked up the cooking time for that food in its database. It could also learn your cooking times for whatever barcodes you fed it. But they screwed up the user design by making the barcode reader a wand-type instead of a grid scanner. You had to actually take the reader out of its pocket and swipe it across the barcode manually -- how gauche. I mean if you're going to be too lazy to read the side of the food packet and punch 2-0-0-start, what makes them think you'll want to pick up a wand?
I've even went to the Motorola hacker sites and loaded new firmware into the machine, trying to disable those buttons.
One suggestion that's sort-of worked for me is to "lock" the volume changes. Go into Settings / Security / Lock Application. Navigate down to Settings / Audio and lock it. Now, when you try to change the volume while the clamshell is closed, it prompts you to enter the unlock code (I think the default is 1234.) If you don't want to change it, press Cancel, and you can still use the phone. You can also change the ring volume while the clamshell is open, just not when it's closed.
It's a stupid workaround to a stupider problem, but it might help you a bit.
Unpacked it at her house, and what do you know? There's a hardware switch to turn the LEDs off, right on the case! Now that was a conveniently useful button.
Far worse is any modern Motorola phone. I seriously despise the Motorola software. They've obviously never tested it under any actual use conditions, or watched any users with a brain try to navigate or use their crapware.
I have the V3 RAZR (ok, not that new anymore, but their new offerings suffer from the same problems) and it's a flip-open style. When I close the phone, I expect the keys to lock. Well, I do, but not Motorola. There are four unlabeled buttons on the edges of the phone that are still active. Two change the ring volume. One starts voice dialing and matches any random ambient sound to someone in my list. There's another button that I have no idea what it does, nor do I care. I just want them off.
All the belt pouches I've found have giant gaping holes allowing convenient access to the buttons while in the pouch. My coat presses them. My seat-belt buckle presses them. A pen sticking up out of my pocket presses them. Sometimes they'll shift the ring volume to silent, causing me to miss calls. Other times they'll crank it up to embarrassingly loud levels just in time for a meeting.
OK, so I figure I'll go into the menus and disable them. No luck -- I can rearrange everything on a menu I don't care about; I can disable network switching even though I use only one; I can turn on and off all kinds of things that are of no use to me. But I can't shut off those accursed outside buttons! Even after spending a month on the cell phone hacking forums, downloading new firmware, picking new options, nothing. It still wants to autodial someone whose name sounds very much like a seat-belt click.
What part of "disable those buttons" is so goddamn hard for Motorola to understand?
Don't forget the iBrator.
That said, I have an old Ziga digital frame on my desk. The resolution is crappy and the colors are awful, and I have to burn my pics to a CF card, but I still like having it. Every time I look up I see a new picture, and I don't have to do anything to keep it running. I almost never take the DVD of family slides and load that up. (OK, never.)
Card data can also be turned into products in most stores. The stolen info can be burned on to an expired card, and the thief anonymously walks out of a store with an HDTV. More clever thieves will go to a store that's out of their norm, one that doesn't see as much fraud -- perhaps a craft store or a furniture store -- and buy a bunch of merchandise, and resell it on the streets or at flea markets. There are sophisticated organized theft rings that will purchase certain kinds of stolen merchandise and pose as legitimate wholesalers that resell it to small merchants.
The underground economy revolving around stolen merchandise and credit cards is rapidly approaching a hundred billion dollars annually in America alone (last figure I saw a year or two ago put the estimate over 60 billion, not counting the MAFIAA.) It's obviously pretty easy to do, if you think like a criminal.
Why'd it have to be gargoyles?
At least it's an efficient way to get yourself Rodney Kinged.
Any word on whether there will be back-ports to existing Palm devices, such as the LifeDrive or the Tungsten family?
When I was a kid, my grandmother had clipped Ladle Rat Rotten Hut from the local newspaper, and my dad and I thought it was hilarious. Every so often, one of us would quote something like "water bag icer gut". A friend recently told me about the book (I didn't know it was a book), and google turned up the above page.
So if I understand you correctly, software patents should be treated like soft wax sculptures that don't last very long, but hardware patents are more like durable cast iron hammers. That means we can melt software patents into candles, using them for lighting and ending the energy crisis, while we can use hardware patents to pound legal textbooks into pulpwood to burn for heat, ending the energy crisis. Both end up solving the energy crisis, so shouldn't we treat them the same?