While the Toughbooks may survive a drop into a vat of molten metal, I have on good authority that they don't take well to being dropped into a spinning dynamometer.
Buddy of mine who works for one of the "Big Three" had the Toughbook on the hood of a car on one of the dynos. Walked away from the laptop and the testing tech gunned the engine. Computer vibrated off the hood and went into the dyno's rollers.
My friend picked up all the pieces, put 'em in a box, went back to his desk, and called the HelpDesk and said: "There's something wrong with my laptop. It won't boot. It booted up fine this morning. I think you need to send someone out to take a look at it."
The look on the HelpDesk technician's face when he looked into the box is said to have been priceless.
The Neo 1973 is GSM-only. OpenMoko doesn't have a phone that supports CDMA network providers, like Sprint. Nor do they have plans to in the foreseeable future.
By contrast, I am confident that Motorola WILL release a variant of their phone that works on Sprint's network.
Open source ideals are great and all, but if it doesn't meet my requirements (I'm not going to buy it.
And for the foreseeable future, "Does it work on Sprint's network?" is one of my requirements.
InstallShield and InnoSetup installers contain PascalScript engines. InnoSetup is written using Delphi -- Pascal. I believe InstallShield is too, but it's been a while since I quit using InstallShield in favor of InnoSetup.
Frankly, the price could be anything. We're talking a release date about two years from now. A lot could conceivably change.
When did those price estimates get put into the Wiki article, who added them, and where did they come from? Digging through the history on the Wikipedia article, I see that the price for the sedan (WhiteStar) got added to the wiki article. November 28, 2006. *EIGHT MONTHS* ago.
I *know* where the statement I made about the price of WhiteStar came from. Actual representatives from Tesla were interviewed for the Electronic Design article I linked to, which was published just *ONE MONTH* ago.
If I were to lay odds of what the actual price was going to be, I'd put money on it being closer to $46k (half of the $92k base price of the roadster) than $70k.
It's also got a ~300 mile range on a full charge, and has a top speed of ~130 MPH, which it can do in reverse.
And its starting list price is $92K, not $98K...
The article also states that they are working on a four-door sedan that they expect to release in 2010 for "about half the price of the roadster."
The Roadster happens to be their first production vehicle. I'd expect it to be expensive. They have a lot of custom parts in that car, and they have to recoup all of the costs associated with custom tooling. If they design future models to reuse those parts (which they'd be stupid not to) that's a significant savings. Which is evidenced by the announcement that the sedan will be half the cost.
How many multi-threaded programs are there anyway?
A LOT.
Most of them just aren't application that someone who only uses their computer to surf the web and play games would walk into Best Buy, Circuit City, or Wal-Mart to buy.
Ray-tracers, webservers, database servers, and compute-farms are just a very small sampling of areas that will directly benefit from having four cores.
1. Do you think the migrant workers are going to be hapy to be out of jobs?
No more so than anyone else who gets put out of a job because the company either increased their automation or decided to offshore their job.
My statement to those people would be the same: "Yeah, it sucks. Get over it. Either find someone else to hire you doing something you're already qualified to do, or find yourself another skillset." If they have to move someplace else to find a job, then while that does suck, that's what they have to do.
And if, post-automation, the lives of any illegal aliens (the premise seems to be that most of the migrant worker class are illegal) no longer qualified to perform any human-occupied jobs within the United States have deteriorated to the point where they truly are miserable, all they have to do is walk into a police station and say "I am here illegally. Please deport me."
2. What will you say when automation renders YOUR occupation redundant?
I am quite content in the knowledge that I will have been long dead by the time that we no longer need humans to develop software or administer networks.
I actually look forward to the day when all menial jobs in our society - from the garbage men, to picking fruit, to working in fast food - have been automated.
Yeah, it'll obsolete an entire class of people. That just means that they'll either have to acquire an updated skillset or go somewhere else.... or enlist in the military.
The problem with discussions such as these is that they only deal with normative conditions. I.E.: you leisurely wander into the restroom and do your thing at your convenience.
Look at the situation from the standpoint of Emergency Planning:
Imagine that you are in *IMMEDIATE* need of restroom facilities. Every second that passes greatly increases the chances of "something untoward" happening.
Got that image firmly in your head? Good. Now, which operation ( #1 or #2 ) are you envisioning yourself being in need of performing?
Chances are you're thinking about #2.
If you're about to lose the contents of your bowels at any instant, which position would you rather see the seat in?
And everyone always gets wrong WHY they're cheaper: payroll taxes.
Abso-freakin'-lutely.
My wife and I run a small business in addition to our day jobs. We have one full-time employee.
Between his state and federal withholdings and all of the taxes that are levied against us, the employer, for every $1.00 net that I write his paycheck for, I have to send almost $0.50 to one government agency or another.
Second, what are the benefits (outside of copying games illegitimately and cheating) would you have by modding your XBox 360?
Specifically, we're talking about modding *the DVD drive*.
One reason to install hacked firmware on the drive not at all related to game play is to be able to use it as a region-free DVD player. IE: allow you to watch a DVD regardless of which country it was marketed for.
Conceivably, once someone successfully manages to port it, it will be possible to run Linux on your 360, as well... but I'm sure that will require a modification to the system board.
Except that, as was pointed out to me by several people when I tried to dispute the (at the time) "only one remote vulnerability..." claim, once you change a config file, you no longer have a default install.
The example I used was that the version of sendmail they had been distributing had a vulnerability that could be exploited to allow someone to allow the execution of arbitrary code with elevated privileges. The response I got was that, because they pre-configure sendmail to only accept connections from the local host, it's not a remote vulnerability -- it's a local one, and thus doesn't count.
I'm sorry, but if all I have to do to "default install" to have a remotely exploitable vulnerability is reconfigure a service that is installed and running in the default install to accept connections from remote computers, I think the claim is disingenuous.
I'm not saying that I have a problem with OpenBSD -- I use it on my firewall boxen and love it. I just have issues with some of their advertising.
A (properly maintained and administered) RAID protects you from downtime caused by hardware failure but does nothing for accidental / malicious data deletion.
If one parent is black and the other white why is their offspring called black?
Because identifying as "Black" can get you numerous benefits under various "Affirmative Action" and "Equal Opportunity" programs that are completely unavailable to you if you claim to be "White".
I understand why they continue to gain popularity (takes less space, you get all the functions for one price, uses less power, etc.), but in general you can always seem to do better from a functionality and features standpoint from individual components than from any integrated 'all-in-one' device. Yes, you can almost always get "better" from discrete components than you can from an "all-in-one". And some discrete components give you better results (and likely cost more) than others. I can build a home entertainment center from discrete components for well under $1K. Or I can spend $20K.
When you're dealing with a consumer market, there is a point at which the "goodness level" becomes "good enough", and this point varies on a consumer-by-consumer basis.
Many people want the higher quality achieved by purchasing multiple discrete components and assembling them into a system. Many others look at the integrated "all-in-one" and say "That's good enough for me."
Can you explain to me why exactly it's an advantage for commercial software? Since you brought up Qt, I'll continue to refer to it in this example. For reference, Pricing for Qt is here. There are a number of links on that page that all take you to the page describing what the various "editions" of Qt licenses get you.
Assume that you want to use Qt to actually develop GUI applications. That means you need a license for either the Desktop or Desktop Light editions. Further assuming that you want to develop apps that use the network in some way, or interface to a database, or work with XML. Now you're stuck with the full Desktop edition.
Continuing with our list of assumptions, let's assume you want to use Qt because you want to be able to recompile my application to target Windows, MacOS-X, and Linux. That means you need the three-platform Desktop license, which will cost you US$6,600.00 for the first year, and US$2,050.00 for every year thereafter that you want to distribute commercial apps built with Qt.
Now, if you work for a larger company, a $6,600 licensing fee for a library might be fairly easy to justify. On the other hand, if you work for a small company, or are just an individual looking to make a few bucks off of a tool you wrote, that $6,600 pricetag is likely going to push you into looking for "some other way" to get a cross-platform GUI.
I'd venture to argue that there are a lot more people wanting to develop software to sell who think that $6,600 is too much money to justify for an initial investment than there are who would find that amount easy to shrug off. Those people would be more likely to keep looking until they found something cheaper or under a non-viral license.
Now, I'm not saying that I think $6,600 is an unreasonable price to ask for the full Qt. I'm saying that a lot of developers are going to look at the licenses for Qt, then look at the pricing for commercial licenses, and then keep looking.
BSD-like licenses are ideal for commercial software because they place no limits on what you do with it. The LGPL is a fairly close second, as long as you can keep the LGPL code in a shared library, rather than statically linked.
And if the main authors of BSD or LGPL -licensed libraries have a donation button, so much the better.
Not if they're set up to read the data when you're at the passport-scanning station.
Here's how it would work:
1) The customs official asks you for your passport. 2) You pull it out of your tinfoil sleeve and hand it over. 3) Customs official opens the front cover and scans the front page so his computer has all of the information for the security key. (It's not used for encryption. It's just a plaintext password.) 4) Customs official's station broadcasts the security key. 5) The RFID tag in your passport broadcasts your passport data.
If I have a sensitive enough high gain antenna pointed at that customs station, I now have both your security key AND all of the information in your passport.
The broadcasts in steps 4 and 5 are OMNI-DIRECTIONAL. They're relatively low-power, because according to the design, the passport's supposed to be only a few cm away from the reader.. But that's why you need a high-gain antenna.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily the best kind of antenna for the job, but it's something that you could get through an x-ray partially disassembled, and nobody would question it.
PLUS You don't have to go waving the antenna around in the open for it to be useful. Radio frequencies will pass through the soft cloth sides of most carry-on luggage with absolutely zero loss in signal strength.
why would a counterfeiter bother cloning it? The hype is that these RFID passports are supposed to be un-clonable.
And they're not.
If the customs official scans a passport and the RFID tag responds as expected, it saves the customs official from actually having to *look* at your passport. If the tag responds as expected, the passport, as a whole, is assumed to be genuine, and only given a cursory look.
THAT is why it is worth a counterfeiter's while to clone the RFID tag.
And as long as you keep your passport in the RF shield, nobody can read it. But the instant you pull it out, anyone can try accessing it.
What's worse: You *know* that Customs Officials won't have Faraday Cages around their reader stations. All someone'll have to do is set up a high-gain antenna somewhere in the area, and they can parasite the data as it's being read by the legitimate scanner.
Keeping your RFID tagged cards in a metal case only prevents them from being read while you've got them stored away. Anytime you pull your card out to use it, someone could have an RFID reader nearby to scan it mid-air.
Or, much easier, find someplace with an RFID reader at the cash register and find someplace to hide a high-gain directional antenna. Let the legitimate reader do the work of powering the tag on the card, and then log the data being broadcast by the tag with the antenna.
RFID tags broadcast omni-directionally. So the reader doesn't have to be in a specific spot. It just has to be close enough to the tag. RFID tags' usable range (distance between tag and reader) is limited by two factors:
1) The tag has to be in a "strong enough" EM field to run. 2) The reader has to have a sensitive enough antenna to be able to receive the data being transmitted by the tag.
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Because, sometimes, you also have to run 3rd party, non-free software... that was written to require IIS.
While the Toughbooks may survive a drop into a vat of molten metal, I have on good authority that they don't take well to being dropped into a spinning dynamometer.
Buddy of mine who works for one of the "Big Three" had the Toughbook on the hood of a car on one of the dynos. Walked away from the laptop and the testing tech gunned the engine. Computer vibrated off the hood and went into the dyno's rollers.
My friend picked up all the pieces, put 'em in a box, went back to his desk, and called the HelpDesk and said: "There's something wrong with my laptop. It won't boot. It booted up fine this morning. I think you need to send someone out to take a look at it."
The look on the HelpDesk technician's face when he looked into the box is said to have been priceless.
The Neo 1973 is GSM-only. OpenMoko doesn't have a phone that supports CDMA network providers, like Sprint. Nor do they have plans to in the foreseeable future.
By contrast, I am confident that Motorola WILL release a variant of their phone that works on Sprint's network.
Open source ideals are great and all, but if it doesn't meet my requirements (I'm not going to buy it.
And for the foreseeable future, "Does it work on Sprint's network?" is one of my requirements.
InstallShield and InnoSetup installers contain PascalScript engines. InnoSetup is written using Delphi -- Pascal. I believe InstallShield is too, but it's been a while since I quit using InstallShield in favor of InnoSetup.
Are you planning on attaching frickin' laserbeams to their frickin' heads?
Frankly, the price could be anything. We're talking a release date about two years from now. A lot could conceivably change.
When did those price estimates get put into the Wiki article, who added them, and where did they come from? Digging through the history on the Wikipedia article, I see that the price for the sedan (WhiteStar) got added to the wiki article. November 28, 2006. *EIGHT MONTHS* ago.
I *know* where the statement I made about the price of WhiteStar came from.
Actual representatives from Tesla were interviewed for the Electronic Design article I linked to, which was published just *ONE MONTH* ago.
If I were to lay odds of what the actual price was going to be, I'd put money on it being closer to $46k (half of the $92k base price of the roadster) than $70k.
This article in Electronic Design Magazine is on electric and hybrid vehicles in general, and prominently features lots of details on the Tesla Roadster.
It's also got a ~300 mile range on a full charge, and has a top speed of ~130 MPH, which it can do in reverse.
And its starting list price is $92K, not $98K...
The article also states that they are working on a four-door sedan that they expect to release in 2010 for "about half the price of the roadster."
The Roadster happens to be their first production vehicle. I'd expect it to be expensive. They have a lot of custom parts in that car, and they have to recoup all of the costs associated with custom tooling. If they design future models to reuse those parts (which they'd be stupid not to) that's a significant savings. Which is evidenced by the announcement that the sedan will be half the cost.
A LOT.
Most of them just aren't application that someone who only uses their computer to surf the web and play games would walk into Best Buy, Circuit City, or Wal-Mart to buy.
Ray-tracers, webservers, database servers, and compute-farms are just a very small sampling of areas that will directly benefit from having four cores.
No more so than anyone else who gets put out of a job because the company either increased their automation or decided to offshore their job.
My statement to those people would be the same: "Yeah, it sucks. Get over it. Either find someone else to hire you doing something you're already qualified to do, or find yourself another skillset." If they have to move someplace else to find a job, then while that does suck, that's what they have to do.
And if, post-automation, the lives of any illegal aliens (the premise seems to be that most of the migrant worker class are illegal) no longer qualified to perform any human-occupied jobs within the United States have deteriorated to the point where they truly are miserable, all they have to do is walk into a police station and say "I am here illegally. Please deport me."
I am quite content in the knowledge that I will have been long dead by the time that we no longer need humans to develop software or administer networks.
I actually look forward to the day when all menial jobs in our society - from the garbage men, to picking fruit, to working in fast food - have been automated.
Yeah, it'll obsolete an entire class of people. That just means that they'll either have to acquire an updated skillset or go somewhere else.... or enlist in the military.
The problem with discussions such as these is that they only deal with normative conditions. I.E.: you leisurely wander into the restroom and do your thing at your convenience.
Look at the situation from the standpoint of Emergency Planning:
Imagine that you are in *IMMEDIATE* need of restroom facilities. Every second that passes greatly increases the chances of "something untoward" happening.
Got that image firmly in your head? Good. Now, which operation ( #1 or #2 ) are you envisioning yourself being in need of performing?
Chances are you're thinking about #2.
If you're about to lose the contents of your bowels at any instant, which position would you rather see the seat in?
Abso-freakin'-lutely.
My wife and I run a small business in addition to our day jobs. We have one full-time employee.
Between his state and federal withholdings and all of the taxes that are levied against us, the employer, for every $1.00 net that I write his paycheck for, I have to send almost $0.50 to one government agency or another.
Payroll taxes suck ass.
Specifically, we're talking about modding *the DVD drive*.
One reason to install hacked firmware on the drive not at all related to game play is to be able to use it as a region-free DVD player. IE: allow you to watch a DVD regardless of which country it was marketed for.
Conceivably, once someone successfully manages to port it, it will be possible to run Linux on your 360, as well... but I'm sure that will require a modification to the system board.
That site has pictures of a lot of Canadian coins I've never seen before.
But since your comment appears to just be meant to direct people to an image of this particular coin, I would have said, instead:
"A picture of the quarter in question can be found in TFA."
I didn't actually *READ* TFA... But I at least clicked through.
Except that, as was pointed out to me by several people when I tried to dispute the (at the time) "only one remote vulnerability ..." claim, once you change a config file, you no longer have a default install.
The example I used was that the version of sendmail they had been distributing had a vulnerability that could be exploited to allow someone to allow the execution of arbitrary code with elevated privileges. The response I got was that, because they pre-configure sendmail to only accept connections from the local host, it's not a remote vulnerability -- it's a local one, and thus doesn't count.
I'm sorry, but if all I have to do to "default install" to have a remotely exploitable vulnerability is reconfigure a service that is installed and running in the default install to accept connections from remote computers, I think the claim is disingenuous.
I'm not saying that I have a problem with OpenBSD -- I use it on my firewall boxen and love it. I just have issues with some of their advertising.
So, tell me how a reference to a series of one-liners by Dr. McCoy on the original Star Trek series gets rated "informative".
What's up with you people?
Funny, I could understand. But informative?!?!?!
Repeat after me:
"A RAID is not a backup."
A (properly maintained and administered) RAID protects you from downtime caused by hardware failure but does nothing for accidental / malicious data deletion.
Because identifying as "Black" can get you numerous benefits under various "Affirmative Action" and "Equal Opportunity" programs that are completely unavailable to you if you claim to be "White".
When you're dealing with a consumer market, there is a point at which the "goodness level" becomes "good enough", and this point varies on a consumer-by-consumer basis.
Many people want the higher quality achieved by purchasing multiple discrete components and assembling them into a system. Many others look at the integrated "all-in-one" and say "That's good enough for me."
Assume that you want to use Qt to actually develop GUI applications. That means you need a license for either the Desktop or Desktop Light editions. Further assuming that you want to develop apps that use the network in some way, or interface to a database, or work with XML. Now you're stuck with the full Desktop edition.
Continuing with our list of assumptions, let's assume you want to use Qt because you want to be able to recompile my application to target Windows, MacOS-X, and Linux. That means you need the three-platform Desktop license, which will cost you US$6,600.00 for the first year, and US$2,050.00 for every year thereafter that you want to distribute commercial apps built with Qt.
Now, if you work for a larger company, a $6,600 licensing fee for a library might be fairly easy to justify. On the other hand, if you work for a small company, or are just an individual looking to make a few bucks off of a tool you wrote, that $6,600 pricetag is likely going to push you into looking for "some other way" to get a cross-platform GUI.
I'd venture to argue that there are a lot more people wanting to develop software to sell who think that $6,600 is too much money to justify for an initial investment than there are who would find that amount easy to shrug off. Those people would be more likely to keep looking until they found something cheaper or under a non-viral license.
Now, I'm not saying that I think $6,600 is an unreasonable price to ask for the full Qt. I'm saying that a lot of developers are going to look at the licenses for Qt, then look at the pricing for commercial licenses, and then keep looking.
BSD-like licenses are ideal for commercial software because they place no limits on what you do with it. The LGPL is a fairly close second, as long as you can keep the LGPL code in a shared library, rather than statically linked.
And if the main authors of BSD or LGPL -licensed libraries have a donation button, so much the better.
Not if they're set up to read the data when you're at the passport-scanning station.
Here's how it would work:
1) The customs official asks you for your passport.
2) You pull it out of your tinfoil sleeve and hand it over.
3) Customs official opens the front cover and scans the front page so his computer has all of the information for the security key. (It's not used for encryption. It's just a plaintext password.)
4) Customs official's station broadcasts the security key.
5) The RFID tag in your passport broadcasts your passport data.
If I have a sensitive enough high gain antenna pointed at that customs station, I now have both your security key AND all of the information in your passport.
The broadcasts in steps 4 and 5 are OMNI-DIRECTIONAL. They're relatively low-power, because according to the design, the passport's supposed to be only a few cm away from the reader.. But that's why you need a high-gain antenna.
A high-gain antenna doesn't have to look like a high-gain antenna, as illustrated by this set of instructions for building a high-gain 802.11b WIFI antenna out of a Pringles can
I'm not saying that this is necessarily the best kind of antenna for the job, but it's something that you could get through an x-ray partially disassembled, and nobody would question it.
PLUS You don't have to go waving the antenna around in the open for it to be useful. Radio frequencies will pass through the soft cloth sides of most carry-on luggage with absolutely zero loss in signal strength.
And they're not.
If the customs official scans a passport and the RFID tag responds as expected, it saves the customs official from actually having to *look* at your passport. If the tag responds as expected, the passport, as a whole, is assumed to be genuine, and only given a cursory look.
THAT is why it is worth a counterfeiter's while to clone the RFID tag.
Sure.
And as long as you keep your passport in the RF shield, nobody can read it.
But the instant you pull it out, anyone can try accessing it.
What's worse: You *know* that Customs Officials won't have Faraday Cages around their reader stations. All someone'll have to do is set up a high-gain antenna somewhere in the area, and they can parasite the data as it's being read by the legitimate scanner.
Nevada.
85% of the state is Federally owned property and the majority of that is nothing but empty desert.
Keeping your RFID tagged cards in a metal case only prevents them from being read while you've got them stored away. Anytime you pull your card out to use it, someone could have an RFID reader nearby to scan it mid-air.
Or, much easier, find someplace with an RFID reader at the cash register and find someplace to hide a high-gain directional antenna. Let the legitimate reader do the work of powering the tag on the card, and then log the data being broadcast by the tag with the antenna.
RFID tags broadcast omni-directionally. So the reader doesn't have to be in a specific spot. It just has to be close enough to the tag. RFID tags' usable range (distance between tag and reader) is limited by two factors:
1) The tag has to be in a "strong enough" EM field to run.
2) The reader has to have a sensitive enough antenna to be able to receive the data being transmitted by the tag.