While I agree with you that the current Office developers are simply good and talented coders and aren't simply leeching off of some undocumented API for their spiffy graphics, it's long been alleged that Microsoft has used undocumented APIs for Office. While I can't find the cite, I believe this was a key part of the anti-trust lawsuit.
You can see "documentation" for many of them on the Sysinternals site. One thing I'd warn against is actually using these calls in production code. Undocumented means unsupported -- MS could decide tomorrow to yank these in their next XP hotfix, and your code would be left hanging high'n'dry. Not that they're likely to do it, but what if one of these had a worm come along exploiting it? The quick and obvious fix would be to simply remove it.
The counter-argument is this: the network would be more valuable if it was mostly composed of privately-run but publically available servers. How rubbish would the Web be if, for example, MySpace was the only company that could host a website? I dare say the WWW revolution wouldn't have happened if client and server software hadn't been freely available.
You just described AOL or Compuserve's history through the end of the last century. Some minor user development happened; there was a large (for its time) community; it was looked down upon by the technical elite; and was generally ignored by the vast majority of unconnected people; and they filled bank vaults with their money. The difference between AOL and Compuserve is that while they both became more and more irrelevant as the web matured, AOL evolved their business model to keep making money while Compuserve failed to do so.
I think Second Life is picking up the AOL reins. They're making money, they've got a devoted fanbase, and they're everything VRML tried to be back in the '90s (and more.) They'll do well for quite a while to come. They may even define the standard for future avatars and navigation that everyone will someday adopt. If that happens then at some point there will probably spring up a rogue network of SL servers as ubiquitous as www servers. The Linden will crash, of course, as the official servers will be abandoned in favor of the free servers. But who knows, if they can provide a griefer-free haven some people may be willing to continue to pay top dollar for it.
Frankly, I'd rather pay them to host the servers than to try to host my own. What with all the griefers making life miserable for the server maintainers, it hardly seems worth the effort to try to run your own public server.
Of course you could run your own private server, like the Construct in the Matrix. You could do things like the "jump" program and "learn karate". But unlike the movie, you can't carry your guns from the fake fake world to the real fake world.
Well, I just googled for the class ID, but didn't find anything other than links to this vulnerability warning. But I don't know of google will index attributes inside of tags.
What's the one piece of survival gear you should always have with you in case you get shipwrecked near a deserted island, or if your plane should crash in the mountains?
A piece of fiber.
Once you realize you are stranded, just take the fiber from your pocket, bury it in the nearest dirt, and wait an afternoon. Some guy with a backhoe will be around to sever it, and just ask him to rescue you.
Thanks, that's probably the most accurate bizarro world answer I could hope for. And even though these conduits were stuffed full (there was no room left for extra wires at all, let alone adding some fat mains wires) I suppose an enterprising yet stupid electrician might think he could have yanked out a dozen of the low-voltage wires and stuffed in his 220VAC.
The other thing I considered was the electrician didn't offer the inspector enough of a bribe. "What, I'm supposed to inspect this whole building, and I'm dyin' of thirst, and you bring me a lousy Coke? Where's the case of beer for me and my buds? Aren't you buying a round after work? Not even a thank-you bottle of scotch? C'mon, guys, let's go see if there aren't some really serious violations around here!"
Jezus H. Christ on a popsicle stick! The NSA and CIA can't stop psychotic nutjobs posting beheading videos on the web, what the hell makes a few addle-brained teachers think they can stop kids from posting to YouTube?
It's no wonder they're turning out idiot students -- the poor kids are being taught by idiots of the first order.
Back in the '80s we had a brand new computer room that had 300 shielded twisted pairs heading to 300 distant stations. The entire place was shiny, painted white, beautifully installed, all running through three large plastic conduits, one to each floor, hung professionally from the ceiling. A textbook illustration of beautiful wiring.
The fire marshall came in and said "you can't have those low-voltage wires run through that conduit, that conduit is designed for high voltage wiring." So the electricians came in and sawed off their beautiful conduits, leaving the wires draped between the four-foot-spaced supports. They tie-wrapped the bundles every foot or two, but it still looked like a dead python hanging between branches.
To this day I still can't fathom what the hell that inspector was thinking.
If you're the sort of person who is able to read individual bits off a platter with such accuracy that you can detect a "history of values" in them, NTFS isn't exactly going to pose an obstacle to recovering the data.
But you're right in that an encrypted file system could cause more difficulties. If the typical data on a drive were English text, it'll have an entropy level of roughly one bit per byte. That means you can easily reconstruct data even if many bits or even bytes go missing.
"I'_ s_re yo_ can fi_ure out _hat le__ers are _iss_ng f_om th_s sen_ence."
Well-encrypted data doesn't offer such niceties, as every byte could potentially have any value. It would be different if the attacker had the key, of course, as each block could be individually analyzed and tested, but even that could take a lot of time and effort.
I've bought over a dozen Commercial Electric bulbs in the past few years (Home Depot specials.) My bulbs exhibit the same kind of delay-on that the GP claims. The bulb is usually in the 60-70 degree Fahrenheit range and it's darn slow to turn on, maybe 0.5 to 1.0 seconds. And it takes them roughly a minute to come to full brightness.
Overall, I'm not thrilled with the illumination performance of CF bulbs. I keep using them in all my sealed ceiling fixtures for two reasons: I don't like the risk of fire brought on by the high-heat incandescents, and I don't like replacing them annually. But the quality of the CF's light is poor, and the color of the light is not the most pleasant. There's plenty of room for someone to invent a better light bulb yet.
The only issue I have with Peter's paper (and it's a good one, I read it several years ago) is that it's examining hard drives that are now over ten years old. The "residue" he found of previous passes of data was due in large part to sloppy manufacturing processes, machine tolerances, and out-of-spec electronics.
Modern drives now have data densities two orders of magnitude higher than those on which he did his research. Many of those stray effects have been largely eliminated by higher precision electronics.
Picture in your mind how a hard drive works: the head swings left-and-right, and feedback from a servo track tells the arm when it's centered over the desired data track. In the old days, that arm just had to be close enough. Reading overwritten data worked by checking the area around a bit to see if there was evidence of other bits written when the arm was in a different position. This shows up as higher or lower signal strength.
All that slop was robbing the drive of potential places to store data. By making the mechanics more precise, manufacturers are able to squeeze more cylinders onto a platter, and bits on a track. The slop Peter was able to discover has been largely eliminated.
Since the NSA has a patent [purdue.edu] on a technique I think it's a little more than theory
Unfortunately, the Patent Office is not exactly the gateway of quality you seem to think it is. Here's a link to Patents for Unworkable Devices, featuring a dozen perpetual motion machines that have slipped through the Patent Office's "no perpetual motion machines" rule. Lest you think this is ancient stuff, one of the most recent patents was granted in 2002.
Just because the NSA has patented a recovery device doesn't mean they can recover your data. They may just want people to believe they can recover your data. (Before I get flamed, yes, I believe this is a valid patent for a working device. I'm just pointing out it doesn't have to be.)
Well, I went googled around for a while and found a few answers. NASA seems to have considered them before.
A wiper mechanism would be complex, add mass, have to survive the take-off and landing, and operate reliably in very cold temperatures. Not impossible, but a challenge (I think the Mercedes guys could give them a few headlamp wiper modules that probably are already well-enough designed.)
It sounds like there isn't enough air for a small fan to do much, and a larger fan would add even more volume and mass. An air compressor would be required to gather enough air to be effective. Air compressors would have to deal with the dust, too, probably with a filtration unit that also has to be somehow cleaned or emptied. And any air-movement solution raises the possibility of generating a local cloud of dust, negating the benefits. Plus, air compressors are extremely power-hungry, they may not have had the power budget to devote to filling the tank and still performing the mission.
I wonder if a vertical solar panel wouldn't have been a better design, one that employed gravity to prevent the dust from settling.
I don't understand why this is "free time." The summary above also uses the words "unexpected longevity", but why didn't anyone expect them to last? The engineers didn't build them to fail, they built them to withstand the stress of landing and the duration of their original mission (90 days?) So why shouldn't they be expected to continue functioning? Is there some engineer sitting at NASA saying "hey guys, we didn't build crappy rovers, quit saying they're only going to last 90 days!"
Or is this the result of the CYA era, in which the engineers had to promise a certain longevity, and nobody was willing to risk more than a 90 day promise.
The source code provided is simply code to decrypt the stream. It's an implementation of the AACS published standard for decrypting a stream. What it does not do is provide a way to extract the keys from the disks.
The author is waiting till some time in the new year to reveal how he got the keys, but the evidence suggests to me that he used some kind of debugging hook into Power HD-DVD.
Next they'll start coming up from the ground in some old people's home and killing everyone
Nah, they won't kill old people, they'll just eat their medicine for fuel. Besides, I've got my life insurance policy from Old Glory Insurance so I feel safe, even though the robots may strike at any time.
Old Glory Insurance. For when the metal ones decide to come for you - and they will.
Antenna jack? Well, aren't we rich, Mr. La-Dee-Dah!?! "Oh, don't mind me, Mummy, I'm off to play the grand piano!" Ours just has a pair of rusty, stripped screws to tighten down on the 300 ohm twin-lead! We used to dream that someday we could upgrade the TV to one that has the luxury of an antenna jack.
You nailed one of my pet peeves dead on -- why does every device in the house need a clock? Stoves, microwave ovens, television sets, telephones, why? A long time ago I bought an electric toothbrush whose charging stand came with a freakin' clock! Enough already!
If my VCRs blink 12:00 these days, it's not because I can't fix them, it's because I've stopped caring if they know what time it is. I'd rather they just include a permanent "clock-off" setting.
Oh, and to kind of get back on the topic of power and your last question; I've long been looking for a "universal low-voltage power supply" solution to the proliferation of wall-warts I've got hanging under my desk at home. I believe I have over twenty transformers powering every device individually. I've long wanted to install a single power supply with a low voltage bus to feed everything. Of course, every device has its own power requirements, from 3.3V, 4.5V, 5V, 6V, 9V, 12V to 18V and who knows what else.
I've also long hoped that Retail USB would take off in the home user market but it hasn't. Cash registers each have many peripherals, such as scanners, scales, card readers, change machines, cash drawers, printers, etc. And they all take more power than USB can typically provide, and some (such as thermal receipt printers) have higher voltage requirements, too. Retailers balked at installing more outlets beneath their cash registers to hang a bunch of wall-warts, so IBM, Fujitsu, NCR and other vendors came up with "Powered USB". It's an just ordinary type-B USB connector that has a stacked power connector mounted just above it, and these power connectors can supply up to 2 amps each at +5V, +12V or +24V. This would allow a USB port to provide enough current for just about any device a home user would wish to connect (short of a laser printer.) But unfortunately the standard never caught on beyond the single industrial application of cash registers.
Our company has gone both ways. We contract with a vendor to host our mainframes, but we've also built our own secure data center to house the many PC and Unix servers.
Contracting is attractive because the lawyers have this idea that you can sue the hosting service for failing to deliver services as promised. Of course if they fail to deliver, you have roughly three days before your company is permanently crippled, and seven before you are out of business, so that ultimately means only the vultures and the lawyers will get paid; but it sounds like a good idea to management. As a government agency you'll get yelled at and fired, and a few members of Congress won't get re-elected, but you won't go out of business.
One advantage to hosting is that they keep us current with hardware. Our contract stipulates an upgrade schedule for both hardware and operating systems, so we're constantly shuffling in the latest and greatest technology.
I don't know what the price difference is, as I don't ever see those kinds of numbers. But a new data center is mind-bogglingly expensive after you factor in generators, fuel tanks, chillers, security, alarms, power, fork-lifts, flooring, racks, cubes, offices, operators, guards, etc. With a hosting service you're sharing some of that overhead with the other customers of the host.
Running your own data center is good if you have a good team that knows what they're doing, and enough depth to survive the inevitable turnover. We do. But knowing how to successfully run a data center is different than knowing how to build one from scratch -- you need both kinds of knowledge before embarking down this path.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, where do I have to go to stand in line?
While I agree with you that the current Office developers are simply good and talented coders and aren't simply leeching off of some undocumented API for their spiffy graphics, it's long been alleged that Microsoft has used undocumented APIs for Office. While I can't find the cite, I believe this was a key part of the anti-trust lawsuit.
You can see "documentation" for many of them on the Sysinternals site. One thing I'd warn against is actually using these calls in production code. Undocumented means unsupported -- MS could decide tomorrow to yank these in their next XP hotfix, and your code would be left hanging high'n'dry. Not that they're likely to do it, but what if one of these had a worm come along exploiting it? The quick and obvious fix would be to simply remove it.
There, corrected that correction for you.
TFA just said "1 disc" not "1 CD." If FC6 is anything to compare by, it'll need to come on one dual-layer-DVD or perhaps one BluRAY disc.
You just described AOL or Compuserve's history through the end of the last century. Some minor user development happened; there was a large (for its time) community; it was looked down upon by the technical elite; and was generally ignored by the vast majority of unconnected people; and they filled bank vaults with their money. The difference between AOL and Compuserve is that while they both became more and more irrelevant as the web matured, AOL evolved their business model to keep making money while Compuserve failed to do so.
I think Second Life is picking up the AOL reins. They're making money, they've got a devoted fanbase, and they're everything VRML tried to be back in the '90s (and more.) They'll do well for quite a while to come. They may even define the standard for future avatars and navigation that everyone will someday adopt. If that happens then at some point there will probably spring up a rogue network of SL servers as ubiquitous as www servers. The Linden will crash, of course, as the official servers will be abandoned in favor of the free servers. But who knows, if they can provide a griefer-free haven some people may be willing to continue to pay top dollar for it.
Of course you could run your own private server, like the Construct in the Matrix. You could do things like the "jump" program and "learn karate". But unlike the movie, you can't carry your guns from the fake fake world to the real fake world.
Now that's funny!
Well, I just googled for the class ID, but didn't find anything other than links to this vulnerability warning. But I don't know of google will index attributes inside of tags.
A piece of fiber.
Once you realize you are stranded, just take the fiber from your pocket, bury it in the nearest dirt, and wait an afternoon. Some guy with a backhoe will be around to sever it, and just ask him to rescue you.
The other thing I considered was the electrician didn't offer the inspector enough of a bribe. "What, I'm supposed to inspect this whole building, and I'm dyin' of thirst, and you bring me a lousy Coke? Where's the case of beer for me and my buds? Aren't you buying a round after work? Not even a thank-you bottle of scotch? C'mon, guys, let's go see if there aren't some really serious violations around here!"
It's no wonder they're turning out idiot students -- the poor kids are being taught by idiots of the first order.
The fire marshall came in and said "you can't have those low-voltage wires run through that conduit, that conduit is designed for high voltage wiring." So the electricians came in and sawed off their beautiful conduits, leaving the wires draped between the four-foot-spaced supports. They tie-wrapped the bundles every foot or two, but it still looked like a dead python hanging between branches.
To this day I still can't fathom what the hell that inspector was thinking.
But you're right in that an encrypted file system could cause more difficulties. If the typical data on a drive were English text, it'll have an entropy level of roughly one bit per byte. That means you can easily reconstruct data even if many bits or even bytes go missing.
Well-encrypted data doesn't offer such niceties, as every byte could potentially have any value. It would be different if the attacker had the key, of course, as each block could be individually analyzed and tested, but even that could take a lot of time and effort.Overall, I'm not thrilled with the illumination performance of CF bulbs. I keep using them in all my sealed ceiling fixtures for two reasons: I don't like the risk of fire brought on by the high-heat incandescents, and I don't like replacing them annually. But the quality of the CF's light is poor, and the color of the light is not the most pleasant. There's plenty of room for someone to invent a better light bulb yet.
Modern drives now have data densities two orders of magnitude higher than those on which he did his research. Many of those stray effects have been largely eliminated by higher precision electronics.
Picture in your mind how a hard drive works: the head swings left-and-right, and feedback from a servo track tells the arm when it's centered over the desired data track. In the old days, that arm just had to be close enough. Reading overwritten data worked by checking the area around a bit to see if there was evidence of other bits written when the arm was in a different position. This shows up as higher or lower signal strength.
All that slop was robbing the drive of potential places to store data. By making the mechanics more precise, manufacturers are able to squeeze more cylinders onto a platter, and bits on a track. The slop Peter was able to discover has been largely eliminated.
Unfortunately, the Patent Office is not exactly the gateway of quality you seem to think it is. Here's a link to Patents for Unworkable Devices, featuring a dozen perpetual motion machines that have slipped through the Patent Office's "no perpetual motion machines" rule. Lest you think this is ancient stuff, one of the most recent patents was granted in 2002.
Just because the NSA has patented a recovery device doesn't mean they can recover your data. They may just want people to believe they can recover your data. (Before I get flamed, yes, I believe this is a valid patent for a working device. I'm just pointing out it doesn't have to be.)
A wiper mechanism would be complex, add mass, have to survive the take-off and landing, and operate reliably in very cold temperatures. Not impossible, but a challenge (I think the Mercedes guys could give them a few headlamp wiper modules that probably are already well-enough designed.)
It sounds like there isn't enough air for a small fan to do much, and a larger fan would add even more volume and mass. An air compressor would be required to gather enough air to be effective. Air compressors would have to deal with the dust, too, probably with a filtration unit that also has to be somehow cleaned or emptied. And any air-movement solution raises the possibility of generating a local cloud of dust, negating the benefits. Plus, air compressors are extremely power-hungry, they may not have had the power budget to devote to filling the tank and still performing the mission.
I wonder if a vertical solar panel wouldn't have been a better design, one that employed gravity to prevent the dust from settling.
Thank you, that's a great answer!
Or is this the result of the CYA era, in which the engineers had to promise a certain longevity, and nobody was willing to risk more than a 90 day promise.
The author is waiting till some time in the new year to reveal how he got the keys, but the evidence suggests to me that he used some kind of debugging hook into Power HD-DVD.
Nah, they won't kill old people, they'll just eat their medicine for fuel. Besides, I've got my life insurance policy from Old Glory Insurance so I feel safe, even though the robots may strike at any time.
Old Glory Insurance. For when the metal ones decide to come for you - and they will.
Antenna jack? Well, aren't we rich, Mr. La-Dee-Dah!?! "Oh, don't mind me, Mummy, I'm off to play the grand piano!" Ours just has a pair of rusty, stripped screws to tighten down on the 300 ohm twin-lead! We used to dream that someday we could upgrade the TV to one that has the luxury of an antenna jack.
You nailed one of my pet peeves dead on -- why does every device in the house need a clock? Stoves, microwave ovens, television sets, telephones, why? A long time ago I bought an electric toothbrush whose charging stand came with a freakin' clock! Enough already!
If my VCRs blink 12:00 these days, it's not because I can't fix them, it's because I've stopped caring if they know what time it is. I'd rather they just include a permanent "clock-off" setting.
Oh, and to kind of get back on the topic of power and your last question; I've long been looking for a "universal low-voltage power supply" solution to the proliferation of wall-warts I've got hanging under my desk at home. I believe I have over twenty transformers powering every device individually. I've long wanted to install a single power supply with a low voltage bus to feed everything. Of course, every device has its own power requirements, from 3.3V, 4.5V, 5V, 6V, 9V, 12V to 18V and who knows what else.
I've also long hoped that Retail USB would take off in the home user market but it hasn't. Cash registers each have many peripherals, such as scanners, scales, card readers, change machines, cash drawers, printers, etc. And they all take more power than USB can typically provide, and some (such as thermal receipt printers) have higher voltage requirements, too. Retailers balked at installing more outlets beneath their cash registers to hang a bunch of wall-warts, so IBM, Fujitsu, NCR and other vendors came up with "Powered USB". It's an just ordinary type-B USB connector that has a stacked power connector mounted just above it, and these power connectors can supply up to 2 amps each at +5V, +12V or +24V. This would allow a USB port to provide enough current for just about any device a home user would wish to connect (short of a laser printer.) But unfortunately the standard never caught on beyond the single industrial application of cash registers.
Contracting is attractive because the lawyers have this idea that you can sue the hosting service for failing to deliver services as promised. Of course if they fail to deliver, you have roughly three days before your company is permanently crippled, and seven before you are out of business, so that ultimately means only the vultures and the lawyers will get paid; but it sounds like a good idea to management. As a government agency you'll get yelled at and fired, and a few members of Congress won't get re-elected, but you won't go out of business.
One advantage to hosting is that they keep us current with hardware. Our contract stipulates an upgrade schedule for both hardware and operating systems, so we're constantly shuffling in the latest and greatest technology.
I don't know what the price difference is, as I don't ever see those kinds of numbers. But a new data center is mind-bogglingly expensive after you factor in generators, fuel tanks, chillers, security, alarms, power, fork-lifts, flooring, racks, cubes, offices, operators, guards, etc. With a hosting service you're sharing some of that overhead with the other customers of the host.
Running your own data center is good if you have a good team that knows what they're doing, and enough depth to survive the inevitable turnover. We do. But knowing how to successfully run a data center is different than knowing how to build one from scratch -- you need both kinds of knowledge before embarking down this path.