That doesn't accomplish anything. You don't think enough people have been complaining already about DRM on software, music or DVD's?
Ah, but bitching and complaining does work at removing DRM in some cases.
Specifically, I'm referring to Intuit's TurboTax DRM fiasco of 2002. That year, they included Macrovision's DiscSafe which installed an NT service called C-Dilla. While not a lot of facts were known at the time, C-Dilla was supposed to be some kind of licensing manager that would either stop you from running a copy from a burned CD of ANY DiscSafe protected software. It was rumored that once you installed C-Dilla it would check for OTHER licensed products, such as audio CDs, and somehow prevent burning copies of it. One easily discovered fact was that even after you uninstalled TurboTax, C-Dilla remained on your computer. C-Dilla was installed in a protected hidden folder and given a random executable name, and in general it looked and acted more like "spy"ware than any product I'd ever seen before.
Thousands of people wrote them complaining about the software. I sent them the most vitriolic flames I could conjure, and vowed to never purchase an Intuit product ever again because they had already convicted me as a criminal and not treated me as a paying customer. To their credit, Intuit responded quickly; first by providing links to a C-Dilla uninstaller on their web site, and then the next year they did not include SafeDisc on their TurboTax consumer product.
As for me, I'm trying to get used to TaxCut, but I've discovered it's a vastly inferior product to TurboTax in terms of ease-of-use. It's a similar problem that equates to "don't go out to see movies produced by Sony."
So, kids, the lesson learned is: bitching can help. Bitch to the record labels, bitch to the store managers, bitch to your congressional representatives, bitch to your state's Attorney General that you're the victim of a bait-and-switch.
Yelling at Sally Salesdrone over at Best Buy won't do anything except get you deservedly kicked out of their store. Calmly talking to Mollie Manager might have more of an effect, but keep your arguments short and to the point. The most you can expect any large organization will do with your complaint is add it to a list. Then, when some magic threshhold like 0.1% of their customers have complained, they'll carry it up the chain to someone who actually has the power to alter their practices.
My son and I built his most recent computer. We started a while ago with a leftover Athlon 1200 of mine and a $20 "refurb" motherboard, and other various junk I had in the bin. Over the past couple of years virtually every component has been replaced through Christmas gifts, "great grades" gifts, birthday presents, etc., and he's purchased some parts with his summer job money. I think the only component he still has that he started with is a hand-me-down keyboard. My only restriction on him so far has been to tell him I'm not paying to replace any component he destroys by overclocking, nor would I give him a replacement for Christmas.
I think it's great that he gets excited when he receives a couple of sticks of PC3200 RAM, and runs off to install them. He knows what's going on inside his machine, and is learning how to troubleshoot it as well. His skills got him his summer job as an intern where he built and upgraded computers in our lab.
And yeah, he plays games. A lot of games. (If his grades were suffering as a result, that would change, but they're not.) Games drive his desire to upgrade his machine, and the upgrades drive the desire to know how to perform them.
I compare my situation with that of a good friend. My friend is just as capable of building a computer as I am, but instead he bought his son a laptop for Christmas. It's his intent to provide a "homework machine." If it can play games, fine, but with the shared-64MB graphics chip in it, it's not going to play many of them. Gaming wasn't one of his goals.
My point is while his kid may be thrilled to get the laptop, he's not going to learn anything from it. Laptop upgrades are notoriously expensive to upgrade, and there's usually very little to upgrade in any case. In my opinion, he threw away the chance to teach his son anything about computers, and simply made it harder for his kid to learn it on his own. Sure, he's got a laptop -- but that's it. "Here's your laptop with pre-installed XP and Office, now write an English paper."
Lowes wasn't exactly "putting" the CC data on the wireless network. However, they had their wireless network on the "inside" of their firewall where it had access to their wired network. What's worse is they did it without even so much as a WEP key -- it was wide open.
Is it still "breaking and entering" if the door was flapping open in the breeze? I suppose 9 years means the answer is "yes", but I'm not totally sure.
They used the store's 802.11b network to access a computer on the inside. They studied that computer, found a program called "tcpauth", and wrote a program to sniff data from it, some of which was credit card information. That's real hacking.
Problem for these guys is that they were attempting to sniff data that could easily be used in the commission of theft. Had they tried to sniff the price database instead (perhaps to post to Froogle or whatever,) they probably would have ended up with a lesser sentence, because it would have been much more debatable if their intent was theft, fraud, or simple hacking. But going after credit card data is "special", so these guys get to spend some "special" time with some new "special" friends.
I don't think it was a troll, for many reasons. I was asking about a "UDP-like" protocol that could be used for consumer remote controls. In my mind, this means "quick response time" -- if you press channel up, you expect the channel to go up now, not two seconds from now. (A mute button that took over a second to quiet the annoying Menards' guy would really get on my nerves quickly.)
Look at his phrase this way: legacy "frequency hoppers". He's saying the hardware that is out there now is frequency hopping, and that it's not a software-controllable thing. Frequency hopping takes a significant amount of time to perform discovery, and that time is not conducive to a remote control that has to respond within less than 330 milliseconds to achieve consumer acceptance. As you pointed out, Bluetooth mice and keyboards have a significant startup time penalty, but that time penalty is the death of "consumer remotes". Remotes don't need to establish "sessions", they're a one-off "change the channel NOW" or "mute the sound NOW", followed by a significant and unpredictable amount of down-time. And unless you have an significant portable source of power, you can't really afford to keep the radios in session just because the consumer might want to change the channel in the next 30 seconds.
Yes, I agree that just because Ericsson ended R & D efforts doesn't mean the "death of Bluetooth." However, for all the technical reasons the parent poster mentioned, there really was nothing for them to do in this arena. They must have realized they were never going to be able to achieve a consumer remote with Bluetooth technology. It certainly wasn't one of the original design goals, anyway -- it would only ever be a retrofit.
Bluetooth's stated goal was to be a cable-replacing technology. Zigbee is supposed to be the "low latency" technology. Perhaps if Zigbee was named "Hi-Speed Bluetooth" (so we could all confuse it with "Bluetooth 2.0":-) it would be less of an issue.
The capacitor idea is kind of neat, but won't work in practice if you're looking for fast response time (remote control buttons.) Capacitors discharge through internal leakage over time, and so won't hold a charge for an extended period of disuse. You'd kill the battery trying to keep it topped off.
It'd work fine in the sensor arena if you're not looking for real-time response, or if you're looking at scheduled transmission times -- charge the capacitor in advance of transmission, or send the signal a couple of seconds later.
Hmm... it would be cool and would probably work in the remote control world if you had an inertial motion sensor that "hinted" to the remote that a human was playing with it. If the remote detected it was being moved, it would get charged up and ready to transmit. When the human hit the button, *bam* -- discharge into the transmitter immediately. But, it probably wouldn't work so well for repeated button presses, or hold-down actions such as "volume up".
Thank you, thank you! That's a great explanation, and it's just what I wanted to know.
My question was along the lines of "if they have a transmitter plus software, what's to stop them from sending short burst packets?" I figured that with software, they could develop a new protocol using the existing hardware, that wouldn't require establishment of a session. Your explanation of frequency hopping plus poor receiver sensitivity puts the idea of a single burst packet firmly in the grave.
Ever turn on a spectrum analyzer near an arc welder? Ever seen the emissions from an unfiltered HVAC servo motor? Ever have to spend an entire g*d-damn week onsite, 16 hours per day, trying to locate the source of some noxious RF interference seven days before your systems go live for their VIP grand opening?
Industrial equipment isn't FCC regulated to not produce spurious emissions the way home equipment is. A lot of the machinery in your average older shop was built in the 1940s for the war effort. EMF emission control was not high on the list of design goals -- cranking out gunbarrels and rivets, etc., was.
Yes, cabling will make for a better antenna for receiving RF interference, and yes, a well-tuned Zigbee antenna will help reject out-of-band interference -- to some degree. But factories are not "RF friendly" environments, no matter how you define RF. Industrial control is going to present a very special challenge to this technology.
I'm just kind of annoyed that they couldn't accomplish the same functionality with Bluetooth radios. I mean really, do I want to carry around YET ANOTHER thing? I already tote around a Bluetooth cell phone, Bluetooth Tungsten PDA, and RF car keys for my truck and my wife's car. And none of those transmitters are in any way, shape or form compatible with Zigbee.
This, combined with the dropping of R&D on Bluetooth, have dashed my hopes that a new Bluetooth protocol to do UDP-style messages for remote control will ever happen.
I suppose now the race is on to see who can make the most incompatible Zigbee TVs, VCRs etc. Sony sure as hell won't want their TV remotes to magically work with JVC surround sound amplifiers.
Anticompetitive or not, this is actually good news for all of us.
What could possibly be sweeter to the anti-DRM market to have the DRM providers snipping at each others heels like dogs fighting over turf?
No amount of "waah, DRM bad!" whining is as effective as pointing to two DRM providers that are pissing on each other, saying "that's what you get with DRM -- companies that can't even figure it out amongst themselves." Even an RIAA toadie would have a hard time putting a positive spin on a move like this.
I, for one, welcome our new DRM turf-fighting warlords. (As long as they keep fighting...)
I don't get the "swipe" thing. Is someone is selling them a box as a kind of 'insurance' deal: "If you use our magic swiper we will pay your underage drinking fines" kind of thing?
Especially in Minnesota. There are two different drivers licenses issued here: one for under-drinking-age and one for drinking-age. The drinking-age license has the photo on the right hand side, and the underage license has the photo on the left. Takes just a glance at the card and picture to see if it's a kid or an adult.
Seems incredibly stupid to me, but then again I'm not a fan of "zero tolerance" for any non-violent crime (except for being the perpetrator of "zero tolerance" laws -- for them, I have zero tolerance.)
Heh. I did this literally here. We had an intern working for us over the summer, and one of his tasks was to collect data and perform initial analysis on a recurring problem. I sat with him before he left for school and found out what he was collecting, what kind of analysis, etc. I then wrote a shell script to collect the data and collate the data. It runs in about three minutes, instead of taking this kid all day.
The funniest part? The intern was my son. So now I get to needle him that I actually DID replace him with a small shell script!
But I don't think my wife will ever get the joke...:-(
I have a Minolta Dimage II film scanner and trust me, it needs to focus every single scan. It's a fairly inexpensive film scanner, but it's certainly not the dirt cheap flatbed scanner the original poster is talking about.
One of the reasons I recommend Vuescan over the crappy Minolta software that comes with it is that Vuescan only takes a few seconds to focus, whereas the Minolta software takes over 20 seconds to focus. I'm not sure if the Minolta software is checking the focus at each corner plus the center of the film and averaging them out or what, but I've found I get equivalent quality focusing regardless of which software package is performing it. (Vuescan will either allow you to pick a focal point on the film image, or autoselect the center.) But I can definitely tell the Minolta software is grinding the focus adjustment from stop to stop several times, while the Vuescan is going back and forth, back and forth in small increments until it hits the optimal range, and then it's done immediately.
I've also found the autofocus to be as close to optimal as I can get with my own eye. That was really amazing the first time I played with it, but now I just trust it. The only time I have to manually adjust it is when I'm dealing with very old curled slide film that has a focal point of interest that's not near the center of the slide.
Nobody's saying "heat your entire house with only a PC" -- that's quite unrealistic.
What they are saying is that the waste heat from a PC will add to the overall heat in your house, reducing (not eliminating) the energy requirements for your primary heat source. If you are running an big Athlon CPU with four hard drives and a Radeon 9800 video card, you're probably drawing somewhere around 400 watt/hours of current from the wall. Considering that very little of that electricity is being converted into "useful work" (classical definition) most of it is being converted to heat. This is no different than running a space heater rated at 400 watts, or having four 100 watt light bulbs burning, or burning 1300 btus worth of gas.
A running computer will emit heat, and there is usually no reason to "waste" that heat by removing it from an area you already have to pay to heat. If you do, you're throwing away money.
The situation is reversed in the summer, of course. In the summer, it's more likely that you're keeping the PC in an air-conditioned room, at which point you're not only generating 400W of heat but also paying for the air conditioning system to REMOVE those 1300 btus of heat.
The Fuji scanner is serious overkill for the home user. I have an older cheapo Minolta Dimage II slide scanner (I think I paid $400 or so for a used one way back when,) and on even a modestly fast speed slide film (200 ISO) I can resolve individual grains in the film. Scanning resolution of much higher than the film grain is basically pointless, unless you're trying to study grain structure and not the pictures they contain. (Scanning at slightly higher resolution than grain size is desirable because it can help reduce the effects of aliasing.)
As a side note, the Minolta software that came with it was horse manure. Vuescan, by Hamrick software, was a wise $80 investment. The color corrections are much, much better, the focusing software is much faster, and the workflow process makes scanning go substantially quicker. I'm also "mostly pleased" with the wide table of color corrections Vuescan comes with. While I'd like to purchase a color reference slide to accurately calibrate it to my exact lamp and sensor, I haven't been able to justify the $135 price tag just yet.
Sure, the Fuji is the gold standard of slide scanners. Yes, I would expect a professional to use the highest end equipment available, because that's what I'm paying him for. But is it truly required? That's harder to say. I think that depends entirely on the results the client demands.
Weather.com is soo last millenium. Assuming you live in America, try www.noaa.gov. They offer point forecasts (within a 5km area), no ads, and you've already paid for them via your tax dollars.
While I love the thought of using the weather underground for weather reporting (it seems like Open Source Weather Forecasting,) I haven't yet mustered up the energy required to figure a proxomitron filter to block the dozens of ads that litter their site. Until I do, the NOAA is still my first choice.
I've been surfing through the Proxomitron for many years now, and so I've been dodging the advertising bullet. Using a non-blocked browser usually brings pain and severe eyestrain as I try to read a story in the midst of blinking monkeys, flashing spyware and virus alerts, and pop-up and pop-under windows.
But in order to support the sites I frequently haunt, I've actually configured it to NOT block ads from those sites. For example, not only have I removed Slashdot from the blocking list but I became a subscriber -- not for the supposed benefit of ad blocking, but to give these guys money to pay for my usage.
That's only true for banner ads, tho. I don't care who you are, dancing javascript or DHTML tricks are just going to piss me off and get themselves blocked in every case. And I simply have flash turned off (thanks Flashblocker!)
I think the same argument can be made for Volvo drivers. Volvos are marketed as "safe" cars, which means they're more likely to be sold to "careful" drivers. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think what this really should do is tell advertisers that if they get a click-through from a Firefox user, then it's a lot more meaningful in terms of potential sale than a click-through from an IE user. A Firefox user is far more likely to "mean it" if they click on an ad. An IE user's click is probably statistically close to indistinguishable from a random click:-)
We had old IBM 4683 cash registers in our stores, installed in the late 1980s. They were 80286 based. We had machines installed in the bath and bedding departments. Think of all the lint and fibers coming off thousands of towels being folded day in and day out, year after year. Picture your dryer lint trap, and multiply that lint until it filled the case.
Darn machines never even slowed down. An IBM engineer even showed me a vial of "IBM Retail Dirt" that they created for testing cash registers in environments like ours. They collected and analyzed the crud they found inside cash register cases, including dirt, dust, lint, rodent droppings, insect parts, etc. Too bad they don't make them like that any more...
Read the whole article, it mentions several hacks that apply not just to XP. Also note: you're probably going to need Admin access to modify the file permissions or registry settings to bring it back.
My father in law's car (which did not have LoJack) was stolen a few years ago. But he lives in such a small town that it has only one real "flop-house", and that's where the sherrif found it parked later in the week.
Partly because these devices rely on security through obscurity, and sales through marketing-hype.
If a security system is recognized and completely understood, it can be disabled or defeated. However, if the system is not recognized in time, it can use that time to phone home, re-encrypt the data, squirt stinky purple ink out the keyboard, whatever.
So, if your concern is that James Bond and Bruce Schneier are going to conspire with the CIA to steal your laptop, well you're pretty much screwed even with this system. But if your bigger concern is that Tom in accounting is going to get pissed off at your new corporate dress code and steal the CEO's laptop in order to "get back at da man", well at least he isn't going to get a free copy of your customer database that he can sell to your competition.
Remember, Woz isn't trying to sell to the CIA -- he's trying to sell to that CEO. Real world security isn't always about perfection -- it's frequently about tipping the odds in your favor as often as possible.
My auto insurance company offers a blanket discount for "theft deterrent devices." I think we can safely assume that if an insurance company is willing to cut prices 10% because the ignition locks up if it's fiddled with, then there really is a measurable deterrent effect.
It's quite obvious that the systems won't stop a dedicated thief, nor will they prevent many other sorts of insurable damage. But they obviously have some overall effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, when am I going to learn to PREVIEW FIRST? Sorry about the italics.
That doesn't accomplish anything. You don't think enough people have been complaining already about DRM on software, music or DVD's?
Ah, but bitching and complaining does work at removing DRM in some cases.
Specifically, I'm referring to Intuit's TurboTax DRM fiasco of 2002. That year, they included Macrovision's DiscSafe which installed an NT service called C-Dilla. While not a lot of facts were known at the time, C-Dilla was supposed to be some kind of licensing manager that would either stop you from running a copy from a burned CD of ANY DiscSafe protected software. It was rumored that once you installed C-Dilla it would check for OTHER licensed products, such as audio CDs, and somehow prevent burning copies of it. One easily discovered fact was that even after you uninstalled TurboTax, C-Dilla remained on your computer. C-Dilla was installed in a protected hidden folder and given a random executable name, and in general it looked and acted more like "spy"ware than any product I'd ever seen before.
Thousands of people wrote them complaining about the software. I sent them the most vitriolic flames I could conjure, and vowed to never purchase an Intuit product ever again because they had already convicted me as a criminal and not treated me as a paying customer. To their credit, Intuit responded quickly; first by providing links to a C-Dilla uninstaller on their web site, and then the next year they did not include SafeDisc on their TurboTax consumer product.
As for me, I'm trying to get used to TaxCut, but I've discovered it's a vastly inferior product to TurboTax in terms of ease-of-use. It's a similar problem that equates to "don't go out to see movies produced by Sony."
So, kids, the lesson learned is: bitching can help. Bitch to the record labels, bitch to the store managers, bitch to your congressional representatives, bitch to your state's Attorney General that you're the victim of a bait-and-switch.
Yelling at Sally Salesdrone over at Best Buy won't do anything except get you deservedly kicked out of their store. Calmly talking to Mollie Manager might have more of an effect, but keep your arguments short and to the point. The most you can expect any large organization will do with your complaint is add it to a list. Then, when some magic threshhold like 0.1% of their customers have complained, they'll carry it up the chain to someone who actually has the power to alter their practices.
I think it's great that he gets excited when he receives a couple of sticks of PC3200 RAM, and runs off to install them. He knows what's going on inside his machine, and is learning how to troubleshoot it as well. His skills got him his summer job as an intern where he built and upgraded computers in our lab.
And yeah, he plays games. A lot of games. (If his grades were suffering as a result, that would change, but they're not.) Games drive his desire to upgrade his machine, and the upgrades drive the desire to know how to perform them.
I compare my situation with that of a good friend. My friend is just as capable of building a computer as I am, but instead he bought his son a laptop for Christmas. It's his intent to provide a "homework machine." If it can play games, fine, but with the shared-64MB graphics chip in it, it's not going to play many of them. Gaming wasn't one of his goals.
My point is while his kid may be thrilled to get the laptop, he's not going to learn anything from it. Laptop upgrades are notoriously expensive to upgrade, and there's usually very little to upgrade in any case. In my opinion, he threw away the chance to teach his son anything about computers, and simply made it harder for his kid to learn it on his own. Sure, he's got a laptop -- but that's it. "Here's your laptop with pre-installed XP and Office, now write an English paper."
Is it still "breaking and entering" if the door was flapping open in the breeze? I suppose 9 years means the answer is "yes", but I'm not totally sure.
They used the store's 802.11b network to access a computer on the inside. They studied that computer, found a program called "tcpauth", and wrote a program to sniff data from it, some of which was credit card information. That's real hacking.
Problem for these guys is that they were attempting to sniff data that could easily be used in the commission of theft. Had they tried to sniff the price database instead (perhaps to post to Froogle or whatever,) they probably would have ended up with a lesser sentence, because it would have been much more debatable if their intent was theft, fraud, or simple hacking. But going after credit card data is "special", so these guys get to spend some "special" time with some new "special" friends.
Look at his phrase this way: legacy "frequency hoppers". He's saying the hardware that is out there now is frequency hopping, and that it's not a software-controllable thing. Frequency hopping takes a significant amount of time to perform discovery, and that time is not conducive to a remote control that has to respond within less than 330 milliseconds to achieve consumer acceptance. As you pointed out, Bluetooth mice and keyboards have a significant startup time penalty, but that time penalty is the death of "consumer remotes". Remotes don't need to establish "sessions", they're a one-off "change the channel NOW" or "mute the sound NOW", followed by a significant and unpredictable amount of down-time. And unless you have an significant portable source of power, you can't really afford to keep the radios in session just because the consumer might want to change the channel in the next 30 seconds.
Yes, I agree that just because Ericsson ended R & D efforts doesn't mean the "death of Bluetooth." However, for all the technical reasons the parent poster mentioned, there really was nothing for them to do in this arena. They must have realized they were never going to be able to achieve a consumer remote with Bluetooth technology. It certainly wasn't one of the original design goals, anyway -- it would only ever be a retrofit.
Bluetooth's stated goal was to be a cable-replacing technology. Zigbee is supposed to be the "low latency" technology. Perhaps if Zigbee was named "Hi-Speed Bluetooth" (so we could all confuse it with "Bluetooth 2.0" :-) it would be less of an issue.
It'd work fine in the sensor arena if you're not looking for real-time response, or if you're looking at scheduled transmission times -- charge the capacitor in advance of transmission, or send the signal a couple of seconds later.
Hmm... it would be cool and would probably work in the remote control world if you had an inertial motion sensor that "hinted" to the remote that a human was playing with it. If the remote detected it was being moved, it would get charged up and ready to transmit. When the human hit the button, *bam* -- discharge into the transmitter immediately. But, it probably wouldn't work so well for repeated button presses, or hold-down actions such as "volume up".
Still, neat idea.
My question was along the lines of "if they have a transmitter plus software, what's to stop them from sending short burst packets?" I figured that with software, they could develop a new protocol using the existing hardware, that wouldn't require establishment of a session. Your explanation of frequency hopping plus poor receiver sensitivity puts the idea of a single burst packet firmly in the grave.
Thanks again!
Industrial equipment isn't FCC regulated to not produce spurious emissions the way home equipment is. A lot of the machinery in your average older shop was built in the 1940s for the war effort. EMF emission control was not high on the list of design goals -- cranking out gunbarrels and rivets, etc., was.
Yes, cabling will make for a better antenna for receiving RF interference, and yes, a well-tuned Zigbee antenna will help reject out-of-band interference -- to some degree. But factories are not "RF friendly" environments, no matter how you define RF. Industrial control is going to present a very special challenge to this technology.
I'm just kind of annoyed that they couldn't accomplish the same functionality with Bluetooth radios. I mean really, do I want to carry around YET ANOTHER thing? I already tote around a Bluetooth cell phone, Bluetooth Tungsten PDA, and RF car keys for my truck and my wife's car. And none of those transmitters are in any way, shape or form compatible with Zigbee.
This, combined with the dropping of R&D on Bluetooth, have dashed my hopes that a new Bluetooth protocol to do UDP-style messages for remote control will ever happen.
I suppose now the race is on to see who can make the most incompatible Zigbee TVs, VCRs etc. Sony sure as hell won't want their TV remotes to magically work with JVC surround sound amplifiers.
What could possibly be sweeter to the anti-DRM market to have the DRM providers snipping at each others heels like dogs fighting over turf?
No amount of "waah, DRM bad!" whining is as effective as pointing to two DRM providers that are pissing on each other, saying "that's what you get with DRM -- companies that can't even figure it out amongst themselves." Even an RIAA toadie would have a hard time putting a positive spin on a move like this.
I, for one, welcome our new DRM turf-fighting warlords. (As long as they keep fighting...)
Especially in Minnesota. There are two different drivers licenses issued here: one for under-drinking-age and one for drinking-age. The drinking-age license has the photo on the right hand side, and the underage license has the photo on the left. Takes just a glance at the card and picture to see if it's a kid or an adult.
Seems incredibly stupid to me, but then again I'm not a fan of "zero tolerance" for any non-violent crime (except for being the perpetrator of "zero tolerance" laws -- for them, I have zero tolerance.)
The funniest part? The intern was my son. So now I get to needle him that I actually DID replace him with a small shell script!
But I don't think my wife will ever get the joke ... :-(
One of the reasons I recommend Vuescan over the crappy Minolta software that comes with it is that Vuescan only takes a few seconds to focus, whereas the Minolta software takes over 20 seconds to focus. I'm not sure if the Minolta software is checking the focus at each corner plus the center of the film and averaging them out or what, but I've found I get equivalent quality focusing regardless of which software package is performing it. (Vuescan will either allow you to pick a focal point on the film image, or autoselect the center.) But I can definitely tell the Minolta software is grinding the focus adjustment from stop to stop several times, while the Vuescan is going back and forth, back and forth in small increments until it hits the optimal range, and then it's done immediately.
I've also found the autofocus to be as close to optimal as I can get with my own eye. That was really amazing the first time I played with it, but now I just trust it. The only time I have to manually adjust it is when I'm dealing with very old curled slide film that has a focal point of interest that's not near the center of the slide.
What they are saying is that the waste heat from a PC will add to the overall heat in your house, reducing (not eliminating) the energy requirements for your primary heat source. If you are running an big Athlon CPU with four hard drives and a Radeon 9800 video card, you're probably drawing somewhere around 400 watt/hours of current from the wall. Considering that very little of that electricity is being converted into "useful work" (classical definition) most of it is being converted to heat. This is no different than running a space heater rated at 400 watts, or having four 100 watt light bulbs burning, or burning 1300 btus worth of gas.
A running computer will emit heat, and there is usually no reason to "waste" that heat by removing it from an area you already have to pay to heat. If you do, you're throwing away money.
The situation is reversed in the summer, of course. In the summer, it's more likely that you're keeping the PC in an air-conditioned room, at which point you're not only generating 400W of heat but also paying for the air conditioning system to REMOVE those 1300 btus of heat.
As a side note, the Minolta software that came with it was horse manure. Vuescan, by Hamrick software, was a wise $80 investment. The color corrections are much, much better, the focusing software is much faster, and the workflow process makes scanning go substantially quicker. I'm also "mostly pleased" with the wide table of color corrections Vuescan comes with. While I'd like to purchase a color reference slide to accurately calibrate it to my exact lamp and sensor, I haven't been able to justify the $135 price tag just yet.
Sure, the Fuji is the gold standard of slide scanners. Yes, I would expect a professional to use the highest end equipment available, because that's what I'm paying him for. But is it truly required? That's harder to say. I think that depends entirely on the results the client demands.
While I love the thought of using the weather underground for weather reporting (it seems like Open Source Weather Forecasting,) I haven't yet mustered up the energy required to figure a proxomitron filter to block the dozens of ads that litter their site. Until I do, the NOAA is still my first choice.
But in order to support the sites I frequently haunt, I've actually configured it to NOT block ads from those sites. For example, not only have I removed Slashdot from the blocking list but I became a subscriber -- not for the supposed benefit of ad blocking, but to give these guys money to pay for my usage.
That's only true for banner ads, tho. I don't care who you are, dancing javascript or DHTML tricks are just going to piss me off and get themselves blocked in every case. And I simply have flash turned off (thanks Flashblocker!)
I think what this really should do is tell advertisers that if they get a click-through from a Firefox user, then it's a lot more meaningful in terms of potential sale than a click-through from an IE user. A Firefox user is far more likely to "mean it" if they click on an ad. An IE user's click is probably statistically close to indistinguishable from a random click :-)
Darn machines never even slowed down. An IBM engineer even showed me a vial of "IBM Retail Dirt" that they created for testing cash registers in environments like ours. They collected and analyzed the crud they found inside cash register cases, including dirt, dust, lint, rodent droppings, insect parts, etc. Too bad they don't make them like that any more...
To that I say, "Let he who is without sin (cast) the first stone."
HOW TO: Disable the Use of USB Storage Devices in Windows XP
Read the whole article, it mentions several hacks that apply not just to XP. Also note: you're probably going to need Admin access to modify the file permissions or registry settings to bring it back.
My father in law's car (which did not have LoJack) was stolen a few years ago. But he lives in such a small town that it has only one real "flop-house", and that's where the sherrif found it parked later in the week.
If a security system is recognized and completely understood, it can be disabled or defeated. However, if the system is not recognized in time, it can use that time to phone home, re-encrypt the data, squirt stinky purple ink out the keyboard, whatever.
So, if your concern is that James Bond and Bruce Schneier are going to conspire with the CIA to steal your laptop, well you're pretty much screwed even with this system. But if your bigger concern is that Tom in accounting is going to get pissed off at your new corporate dress code and steal the CEO's laptop in order to "get back at da man", well at least he isn't going to get a free copy of your customer database that he can sell to your competition.
Remember, Woz isn't trying to sell to the CIA -- he's trying to sell to that CEO. Real world security isn't always about perfection -- it's frequently about tipping the odds in your favor as often as possible.
It's quite obvious that the systems won't stop a dedicated thief, nor will they prevent many other sorts of insurable damage. But they obviously have some overall effect.