I will also add, that I bought a SLVR L7 in mid-2006. My experience with that phone's form factor was one of the factors that made me decide to go with a Samsung Galaxy S in 2010.
That being said, this is still pretty dumb. I think they need to get the patent clerk on the stand and ask them what is so novel about a black box with a screen on one side and rounded corners.
Indeed. Let's not forget about the Motorola SLVR which was a very-thin chocolate bar phone (that also came in shiny black plastic - scroll down to the SLVR L7). If you figure out that you can replace the keyboard with part of a touch-screen, and then resize the screen to keep an aspect ratio to display movies, you get something that looks a lot like an iPhone. It's a minor evolutionary design change that arises from the functional change (virtual keypad and bigger display).
P.S. the F1 engine was mostly designed and developed during the late 1950's, not the early 60's. "Test firings of F-1 components had been performed as early as 1957"
I don't see the OP saying anything about "no computers", just that the F1 engine was designed on blackboards and drafting tables, which appears to be generally accurate. It's a >50-year old design.
Apparently use of IBM computers in rocket design goes back to the 50's and the Redstone rocket. However I'm not sure what computations were performed during the Redstone or F1 design. Maybe it was to numerically solve some differential equations that were first laid out on a blackboard (to avoid having to use the manual processes that were used in the Manhattan Project). Maybe it was for analysis of test data during the years it took to analyze the combustion instability problems of the F1. Nevertheless, the computational capability of the 36-bit word, 40Kips IBM 704 was pretty limited and its use would have been similarly limited. They wouldn't have been using it for finite element structural analysis, 3D combustion simulations, or any of the other kinds of CAE tools possible with modern supercomputers. If they had had those kinds of tools available, F1 development very likely wouldn't have taken 7 years. Applying modern CAE tools and computer power to an F1 redesign could provide new insights, or allow retrofitting capabilities such as thrust throttling, which would have been beyond the computing capabilities of 50's engineers.
To be fair, we often do the same thing with smart vs. trained. A smart child can tell you that 3 * 3 = 9 because they know that 3 * 3 is the same as 3 + 3 + 3 which is the same as 1 +1 +1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 9. A trained child tells you that 3 * 3 = 9 because that is what the times table chart they were told to memorize says.
I disagree. Both are trained children, just with different levels of training. A trained child could also repeat or demonstrate the proof by 9, which is related to the divisibility of the sum of the digits that indicates whether a number is divisible by 3 or 9. The smart child (who presumably also has been exposed to the associative and commutative principles), will be able to figure out why the proof by 9 works (although you'll probably need to prod the child by asking the question and breaking it down using the divisibility problem first).
Everyone is going to specialize after leaving high school, but the well rounded students who might be a step behind on specialization will be two steps ahead with creativity.
It's funny but I've been picking up little tidbits of knowledge from all sorts of different areas and used to surprise people at work with random applicable factoids in various situations. I have never thought of myself as particularly creative. It's only after reading Doidges' book "The brain that changes itself" that I've understood that, while diversity of experience is necessary for being creative by applying approaches from an unrelated field to a given problem, that very creative people are also missing certain critical/filtering functions (as in critiquing one's ideas). My sister is much more creative than I, but she's more gullible and has sometimes come up with some doozies. This is why very creative people are often excentric. For me, the filtering functions work at a subconscious level, discarding ideas before thoughts ever breach the conscious level where they might be improved. I'm still wondering if there's someway to learn/practice turning the filtering functions on and off at will.
Sometimes, confusion of homonyms is a symptom of dyslexia. Not always of course - sometimes it's just sloppiness. But often it's an indication that there's a minor part of the brain of the author that's not working normally. I used to feel like you, and then had sequelae arising from CFS. I now have to double-check everything I write to correct homonym mistakes that I never used to make. It's frustrating, although after about 6 years since I first noticed the problem, it finally seems to be happening less frequently.
Just because IBM 704s may have been used to help with the design of F1 engine operations through simulation of certain functions (perhaps for multi-engine vibrational stability control?) doesn't turn those 701s into personal CAD stations. Since CADD systems didn't get mainstream deployment until the early 80s when microprocessors made "personal" computers possible, it would indeed be surprising if the original drawing of the F1 parts were done on anything other than drafting tables.
Lastly, why couldn't they build a huge engine and de rate it to obtain reliability?
Because every extra pound of engine adds up to a whole lot of extra pounds of fuel/oxidizer to fly the increased engine weight to the same top altitude (for a given stage the engine is used on). Even more so than with airplaines, a KPI for rockets is thrust/engine weight. The reason is that your rocket's mass*g effectively decreases the force factor in the specific impulse of the rocket.
Except Amazon isn't really looking at doing local retail. They're looking at decentralizing part of their warehouse and distribution. As someone pointed out, they've already got a pretty good idea of what regional usage looks like from their sales history, so the risk of excess inventory isn't that high. While they will have higher costs due to more infrastructure, they'll probably still locate outside urban centres to use cheaper land and secure better property tax deals with smaller municipalities. Even so, they may wind up spending less and earning more on shipping as a result since their external delivery costs should drop due to reduced distances between warehouse and customer. I mean if the delivery time is dropping to 1 day, you don't think what they charge for shipping is going to drop do you?
I think there is a better chance that the local company will be more involved in community-supporting activities than a multinational with a local presence for a couple of reasons:
A local company has a higher chance of being privately owned as opposed to publicly owned. Local management are more likely to have emotional and social ties to members of the community and act in consideration of the local impact of their actions than remotely located executives.
Being limited to the community's patronage increases the chance that the local company will be responsive to the community rather than to less interested remote stockholders.
Those two tendencies aren't set in stone of course. Your local company could be owned by a greedy, micromanaging, and tyrannical miser who doesn't care about the people in the community or whether they hate him/her. Conversely the multinational could be working hard to maintain an image of community involvement, responsible/ecologically sensitive stewardship, and employee empowerment/engagement to appeal to a particular market segment and keep churn/hiring expenses low. Generally though, those two tendencies I first listed do seem to be pretty strong, with exceptions being less common.
On second thought, I think fetchmail deletes messages once it's picked them up from the POP mailbox, whereas I use TB's Leave messages on server Until I delete them options, so just copying the fetchmail algorithm wouldn't work. I've never used getmail or fdm so I don't know if they support a similar option to the TB POP mode I use.
So your solution to "POP synchronization is so ridiculously badly broken that you almost might as well rip it out" is "run your own IMAP server for a single user account and use something like fetchmail to populate it from the POP account"? Is that seriously supposed to be a workaround for an average user? Are you responsible for TB bug triage? Because that would explain the 10 year old folder-renaming bug someone pointed out.:-) Seriously, though, if fetchmail/getmail/fdm manage to get it right, why doesn't someone copy the bloody algorithm from any of those 3 programs into TB? I don't think that POP3 bug has been in there for ten years, but I've been bitten by it at least a few times over the past 5 (and I don't tend to delete messages from webmail that often). It's apparently common enough that someone has written an add-in to deal with the duplicates but no one has fixed the root cause.
Yep. My biggest peeve about Thunderbird is that every now and then, if I clean up a few messages in the POP inbox through webmail instead of through TB, then the next time TB synchronization runs it goes crazy and it duplicates messages in the POP inbox going back months. Huh? How the heck can it not figure out that it should only be downloading messages newer than the latest received and not hundreds of messages it already has copies of?
Then try to remove either of the duplicates and the Inbox copy gets toast, so you have to change your "server" settings for deleting messages, delete the duplicates, and then set the "server" options back.
Actually, the greeks (and spanish, and french) make a lot of that Made in Italy olive oil. Same with some high-end Italian shoes, handbags, etc. where production has largely been moved to China. Not everything marked Made in Italy is really/completely made in Italy. It's like Made in the USA cars that are just assembled from parts made in China, Mexico, and South America, or that Nexus Q thing. Like the USA, Italians are pretty good at branding and marketing. Even with "German" products, more and more are only designed in Germany as well, although that's less than in the case of the USA.
Secureboot would not have solved those... Neither are bootloader malware.
No, but a secure boot loader is a link in the boot chain, so if you want to require it for the kernel and drivers (which would have solved those) then you do need to extend that to the boot loader or else the boot loader becomes the obvious point of attack. Just because the crooks are coming in the front door doesn't mean you shouldn't improve the lock on the back door at the same time as when you improve the lock on the front door. I agree that it's obvious that the owner should be the one who holds the keys, but concerns about who holds the keys doesn't mean there isn't value in installing [any/better] locks.
It's like a chain of custody for your O/S. The information is only as safe as the weakest link.
That's not quite true. It's possible for an O/S to detect if it's running in a virtualized environment because the overhead of trapping and emulating privileged instructions is substantial and can be detected using the system clock when compared to other non-privileged instructions. It would therefore require a lot of work to trick windows into ignoring that, because you would need to disable that visualization check code, as well as the object loader's crypto checks for the signature on its replacement.
Now for an app to detect that its in a virtualized environment would be much harder because apps shouldn't be able to run privileged instructions. In a world where WINE is able to perfectly impersonate Windows APIs, that app shouldn't be able to tell.
If you try to stock mainboards, then you need to stock memory and CPUs as well because interfaces change. So you won't be able to get CPUs and memory that work with your 2012 mainboard in 2020. You'll also be giving up on all performance improvements that may come along over that time.
There will be somebody that will cater to that niche market by providing current motherboards with firmware that allow you to override the MS Keys. After all, all it will need is a slightly different firmware install on the same hardware, so somebody could just de-solder and swap out the ROMs on COTS hardware. But it will cost you more and you may need to use mail-order instead of being able to pick it up at Walmart or Fry's. When you hear that the government is working on legislation to make it illegal to sell mainboards that allow user-specified keys, that's when you want to stock up. Or emigrate, because the slide down that slippery slope of loss of freedoms will just accelerate.
And getting the BIOS image to put onto that USB stick all too often requires Windows to unpack it out of a self executing binary
That's just a bandwidth saving measure for their update servers. You can rename many self-extracting executables to using a.zip extension and just extract the file you need. There are some vendors that do use non-standard extractors for Windows O/S drivers, that require you to run the extractor from Windows (it's a Windows driver, OK!), but I don't remember having that problem with BIOS releases.
> I've seen quite a few 'boot from cdrom' style bios upgrades, too. and on the cdrom? syslinux!;)
You know what I call that? Flash from user space. Bad idea
I think he meant that it's a bootable CD image using a stripped-down Linux to run the firmware update app (as opposed to old style DOS-based diskettes that no one has floppy drives for anymore). Usually those downloadable images are accompanied by crypto hash checksums so that you can verify they haven't been tampered with. With a UEFI BIOS, they would probably also be signed with the manufacturer's key to allow secure boot. Since it's a read-only medium, as long as you power off the system first to clear RAM, it should be as safe as the BIOS itself, without requiring the user to navigate through a menu to perform the update.
Well actually, it's also that there's large swathes of Greek society that have huge tax exemptions that limit government revenue as a portion of GDP. Generally per-capita government expenditures haven't been that high compared to the rest of Europe, and Greeks have one of the highest hours-worked-per-person ratios in Europe, so their financial situation isn't because too many people are lazy and sitting at home collecting welfare.
Hmm, professional and upper classes paying low taxes due to exemptions and loopholes, thus decreasing government revenues while deficit and debt go up. Why does that sound familiar?
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I will also add, that I bought a SLVR L7 in mid-2006. My experience with that phone's form factor was one of the factors that made me decide to go with a Samsung Galaxy S in 2010.
Um, Samsung could have found this out during discovery.
Indeed. Let's not forget about the Motorola SLVR which was a very-thin chocolate bar phone (that also came in shiny black plastic - scroll down to the SLVR L7). If you figure out that you can replace the keyboard with part of a touch-screen, and then resize the screen to keep an aspect ratio to display movies, you get something that looks a lot like an iPhone. It's a minor evolutionary design change that arises from the functional change (virtual keypad and bigger display).
P.S. the F1 engine was mostly designed and developed during the late 1950's, not the early 60's. "Test firings of F-1 components had been performed as early as 1957"
I don't see the OP saying anything about "no computers", just that the F1 engine was designed on blackboards and drafting tables, which appears to be generally accurate. It's a >50-year old design.
Apparently use of IBM computers in rocket design goes back to the 50's and the Redstone rocket. However I'm not sure what computations were performed during the Redstone or F1 design. Maybe it was to numerically solve some differential equations that were first laid out on a blackboard (to avoid having to use the manual processes that were used in the Manhattan Project). Maybe it was for analysis of test data during the years it took to analyze the combustion instability problems of the F1. Nevertheless, the computational capability of the 36-bit word, 40Kips IBM 704 was pretty limited and its use would have been similarly limited. They wouldn't have been using it for finite element structural analysis, 3D combustion simulations, or any of the other kinds of CAE tools possible with modern supercomputers. If they had had those kinds of tools available, F1 development very likely wouldn't have taken 7 years. Applying modern CAE tools and computer power to an F1 redesign could provide new insights, or allow retrofitting capabilities such as thrust throttling, which would have been beyond the computing capabilities of 50's engineers.
Taiwan is sovereign and independent from China in the same way that Tibet was sovereign and independent from China prior to 1950.
I disagree. Both are trained children, just with different levels of training. A trained child could also repeat or demonstrate the proof by 9, which is related to the divisibility of the sum of the digits that indicates whether a number is divisible by 3 or 9. The smart child (who presumably also has been exposed to the associative and commutative principles), will be able to figure out why the proof by 9 works (although you'll probably need to prod the child by asking the question and breaking it down using the divisibility problem first).
Specialization is for insects
It's funny but I've been picking up little tidbits of knowledge from all sorts of different areas and used to surprise people at work with random applicable factoids in various situations. I have never thought of myself as particularly creative. It's only after reading Doidges' book "The brain that changes itself" that I've understood that, while diversity of experience is necessary for being creative by applying approaches from an unrelated field to a given problem, that very creative people are also missing certain critical/filtering functions (as in critiquing one's ideas). My sister is much more creative than I, but she's more gullible and has sometimes come up with some doozies. This is why very creative people are often excentric. For me, the filtering functions work at a subconscious level, discarding ideas before thoughts ever breach the conscious level where they might be improved. I'm still wondering if there's someway to learn/practice turning the filtering functions on and off at will.
Sometimes, confusion of homonyms is a symptom of dyslexia. Not always of course - sometimes it's just sloppiness. But often it's an indication that there's a minor part of the brain of the author that's not working normally. I used to feel like you, and then had sequelae arising from CFS. I now have to double-check everything I write to correct homonym mistakes that I never used to make. It's frustrating, although after about 6 years since I first noticed the problem, it finally seems to be happening less frequently.
Just because IBM 704s may have been used to help with the design of F1 engine operations through simulation of certain functions (perhaps for multi-engine vibrational stability control?) doesn't turn those 701s into personal CAD stations. Since CADD systems didn't get mainstream deployment until the early 80s when microprocessors made "personal" computers possible, it would indeed be surprising if the original drawing of the F1 parts were done on anything other than drafting tables.
Does that factor in inflation? Because $20,000 circa 1970 != $20,000 in 2012 for purchasing power.
Because every extra pound of engine adds up to a whole lot of extra pounds of fuel/oxidizer to fly the increased engine weight to the same top altitude (for a given stage the engine is used on). Even more so than with airplaines, a KPI for rockets is thrust/engine weight. The reason is that your rocket's mass*g effectively decreases the force factor in the specific impulse of the rocket.
Except Amazon isn't really looking at doing local retail. They're looking at decentralizing part of their warehouse and distribution. As someone pointed out, they've already got a pretty good idea of what regional usage looks like from their sales history, so the risk of excess inventory isn't that high. While they will have higher costs due to more infrastructure, they'll probably still locate outside urban centres to use cheaper land and secure better property tax deals with smaller municipalities. Even so, they may wind up spending less and earning more on shipping as a result since their external delivery costs should drop due to reduced distances between warehouse and customer. I mean if the delivery time is dropping to 1 day, you don't think what they charge for shipping is going to drop do you?
I think there is a better chance that the local company will be more involved in community-supporting activities than a multinational with a local presence for a couple of reasons:
Those two tendencies aren't set in stone of course. Your local company could be owned by a greedy, micromanaging, and tyrannical miser who doesn't care about the people in the community or whether they hate him/her. Conversely the multinational could be working hard to maintain an image of community involvement, responsible/ecologically sensitive stewardship, and employee empowerment/engagement to appeal to a particular market segment and keep churn/hiring expenses low. Generally though, those two tendencies I first listed do seem to be pretty strong, with exceptions being less common.
On second thought, I think fetchmail deletes messages once it's picked them up from the POP mailbox, whereas I use TB's Leave messages on server Until I delete them options, so just copying the fetchmail algorithm wouldn't work. I've never used getmail or fdm so I don't know if they support a similar option to the TB POP mode I use.
So your solution to "POP synchronization is so ridiculously badly broken that you almost might as well rip it out" is "run your own IMAP server for a single user account and use something like fetchmail to populate it from the POP account"? Is that seriously supposed to be a workaround for an average user? Are you responsible for TB bug triage? Because that would explain the 10 year old folder-renaming bug someone pointed out. :-) Seriously, though, if fetchmail/getmail/fdm manage to get it right, why doesn't someone copy the bloody algorithm from any of those 3 programs into TB? I don't think that POP3 bug has been in there for ten years, but I've been bitten by it at least a few times over the past 5 (and I don't tend to delete messages from webmail that often). It's apparently common enough that someone has written an add-in to deal with the duplicates but no one has fixed the root cause.
Shaw residential, and in fact most major Canadian ISPs, don't offer IMAP service.
Yep. My biggest peeve about Thunderbird is that every now and then, if I clean up a few messages in the POP inbox through webmail instead of through TB, then the next time TB synchronization runs it goes crazy and it duplicates messages in the POP inbox going back months. Huh? How the heck can it not figure out that it should only be downloading messages newer than the latest received and not hundreds of messages it already has copies of?
Then try to remove either of the duplicates and the Inbox copy gets toast, so you have to change your "server" settings for deleting messages, delete the duplicates, and then set the "server" options back.
Actually, the greeks (and spanish, and french) make a lot of that Made in Italy olive oil. Same with some high-end Italian shoes, handbags, etc. where production has largely been moved to China. Not everything marked Made in Italy is really/completely made in Italy. It's like Made in the USA cars that are just assembled from parts made in China, Mexico, and South America, or that Nexus Q thing. Like the USA, Italians are pretty good at branding and marketing. Even with "German" products, more and more are only designed in Germany as well, although that's less than in the case of the USA.
Don't forget saving and restoring encryption keys if you're using encryption on user directories.
No, but a secure boot loader is a link in the boot chain, so if you want to require it for the kernel and drivers (which would have solved those) then you do need to extend that to the boot loader or else the boot loader becomes the obvious point of attack. Just because the crooks are coming in the front door doesn't mean you shouldn't improve the lock on the back door at the same time as when you improve the lock on the front door. I agree that it's obvious that the owner should be the one who holds the keys, but concerns about who holds the keys doesn't mean there isn't value in installing [any/better] locks.
It's like a chain of custody for your O/S. The information is only as safe as the weakest link.
That's not quite true. It's possible for an O/S to detect if it's running in a virtualized environment because the overhead of trapping and emulating privileged instructions is substantial and can be detected using the system clock when compared to other non-privileged instructions. It would therefore require a lot of work to trick windows into ignoring that, because you would need to disable that visualization check code, as well as the object loader's crypto checks for the signature on its replacement.
Now for an app to detect that its in a virtualized environment would be much harder because apps shouldn't be able to run privileged instructions. In a world where WINE is able to perfectly impersonate Windows APIs, that app shouldn't be able to tell.
There will be somebody that will cater to that niche market by providing current motherboards with firmware that allow you to override the MS Keys. After all, all it will need is a slightly different firmware install on the same hardware, so somebody could just de-solder and swap out the ROMs on COTS hardware. But it will cost you more and you may need to use mail-order instead of being able to pick it up at Walmart or Fry's. When you hear that the government is working on legislation to make it illegal to sell mainboards that allow user-specified keys, that's when you want to stock up. Or emigrate, because the slide down that slippery slope of loss of freedoms will just accelerate.
That's just a bandwidth saving measure for their update servers. You can rename many self-extracting executables to using a .zip extension and just extract the file you need. There are some vendors that do use non-standard extractors for Windows O/S drivers, that require you to run the extractor from Windows (it's a Windows driver, OK!), but I don't remember having that problem with BIOS releases.
I think he meant that it's a bootable CD image using a stripped-down Linux to run the firmware update app (as opposed to old style DOS-based diskettes that no one has floppy drives for anymore). Usually those downloadable images are accompanied by crypto hash checksums so that you can verify they haven't been tampered with. With a UEFI BIOS, they would probably also be signed with the manufacturer's key to allow secure boot. Since it's a read-only medium, as long as you power off the system first to clear RAM, it should be as safe as the BIOS itself, without requiring the user to navigate through a menu to perform the update.
Well actually, it's also that there's large swathes of Greek society that have huge tax exemptions that limit government revenue as a portion of GDP. Generally per-capita government expenditures haven't been that high compared to the rest of Europe, and Greeks have one of the highest hours-worked-per-person ratios in Europe, so their financial situation isn't because too many people are lazy and sitting at home collecting welfare.
Hmm, professional and upper classes paying low taxes due to exemptions and loopholes, thus decreasing government revenues while deficit and debt go up. Why does that sound familiar?