No it's not actually. If it were 100% perpendicular I would agree, but the car is moving forward, the wheel is pushed into the pothole by the car's suspension, and then the wheel hits the lip of the pothole at some angle other than 90 degrees. If the pothole was deep enough, the tire would hit the front of the pothole dead on without even touching the bottom at all, destroying the car and completely contrary to your description.
Also, no the ride would be rougher, because the back emf in the generator attached to the shock will prevent the shock from doing its job.
What WOULD make a smoother ride is the exact opposite - detect the pothole just before the tire hits it and literally lift the tire up a bit with a solenoid actuator to keep it from dropping into the pothole in the first place. This of course assumes the other three wheels are on solid flat ground and that the pothole is small enough that the car's momentum will keep it from tipping downwards as it sits on the remaining three contacted wheels.
In fact it will have a net negative effect on your gas mileage. If you put an electric (re)generator on a shock absorber, and hook it up to an electrical load (to capture the energy) then the generator will fight back when the shock absorber tries to react to the pothole. In effect, it will directly reduce the "shock absorbing" capability of the shock absorber, giving you both a rougher ride and slowing your car down more.
Since there are always losses in energy transfer, the amount you "recover" will always be less than the amount put into the system by you having to use more gas as a result of the harder bump.
It's called Back EMF, basic high school physics. Beware the Wikipedia article on Back EMF, it loosely covers the concept but the article links to a "serious" entry about a perpetual motion machine called Perepiteia, which also would violate the laws of thermodynamics.
The "inventor" "doesn't understand how it works" and yet worked "8-12 hour days on it" making a transformer 7000% efficient! Sigh..
It's not clear at all from the article that Google are actually using the "Microsoft Active Sync" software directly. It says they licensed the "technology".
I expect they made their own "two way" sync product for google that does not interoperate with active sync, maybe?
It's an incredibly obvious idea, just another lame patent locked down by big dollars. You could argue that two way information sync has been going on since the first two people had an agreeable conversation.
During the height of the USSR it can be argued that they had a better education system in place than the US.
Why didn't they excel at modern technology? A total lack of a consumer electronics market to lower the price of semiconductors thru mass production.
Texas Instruments were able to grow rapidly with the sale of pocket calculators, lowering the cost of silicon and starting the Moore's law runaway train.
USSR had no such advantage, and rapidly fell behind the US in technology after the Second World War.
China gets this, and as such began to allow a form of a mass market to grow from Hong Kong inwards, modernizing their economy.
At first I too got far less calls, but in the last couple of weeks I've been getting scam calls, a recorded voice telling me this is my last chance to set my "credit card accounts" in order, no mention of a particular brand.
Even if you managed to only get the list in the hands of Canadian telemarketers, it's pretty trivial for the list to then leak out, either directly or via some windows trojan or virus..
My guess is the scam traffic is going to increase..
Yes, known black hat servers should be blocked, but it won't help. It is trivial for a botnet designer - who ends up with a huge network of windows PC's across all ip address ranges - to randomize and encrypyt the main control point of the botnet so that blocking a couple of IP addresses would be routed around in a couple of seconds, probably automatically.
The original poster made the claim that a weakness in acrobat was used as an exploit that then trashed his linux system so badly that he had to reformat and reinstall.
The only way this could happen is if acrobat itself had root permissions.
I have over 25 years of experience with many OS's and I call bullshit back atcha.
PS, why on earth are you bothering to write a java application for Safari? By your logic you should only write for internet explorer, Mr. Blue Ocean Strategy.
Agreed, I guess my initial post was poorly worded, since I was trying to show how silly the "Microsoft popularity theory of virus targets" propaganda was.
I've had several comments telling me the theory was a poor one. It's not my theory!:) I agree, it's a terrible theory (that was my point - it's BS from Microsoft!)
You really are ignoring the point - if a virus author can first own a web server, then he is now inserted in a position of trust with all the potentially thousands of end users who call on said server, which he can now exploit directly.
This is such an obvious advantage - and it's been done when someone sets up a web server with poor application security - the SQL insertion overrun variants being a common example.
Do you run XP without an add on firewall or virus protection tool? No? Why not? Because it's inherently insecure.
I agree that the typical linux user is a big part of why linux is a harder nut to crack.
Anyhow, we seem to disagree completely and are not producing any new or insightful ideas to the debate. Nuff said.
No, I'm pointing out that a web server is a much more valuable target than an end user's PC. It's a central hub with a "trusted" entry point into many more of those end user PCs. You can't follow that logic? As a virus writer, would you rather own a bank's server or Grandma's home PC?
The Microsoft propaganda is that nobody writes viruses for linux because it is unpopular, not because it is inherently more secure than Windows XP.
I'm pointing out that there are plenty of interesting reasons to try to compromise a linux machine. If linux OS itself was as inherently insecure as windows XP its predecessors , no amount of effort by a professional admin would be able to keep it safe. Said google professionals chose wisely.
It's difficult to comprehend how you could misinterpret my post so badly.
As I point out to others, I'm trying to shoot down the Microsoft's popularity rule of Virus market share..
It's been trivial to attach windows, and hard to attack Unix variants, mostly because of the "install as root, run as user" model that Microsoft finally put to work in Vista. (It's there in XP but not terribly usable since many apps expect admin privileges)..
I agree with some of your points.. Some virus writers are smart, but it is so incredibly easy to write a virus for Pre Vista windows, that most virus writers don't have to be anything more than a dumbass script kiddy.
I mean, hell when Microsoft in their wisdom first enabled the passing of executables in email, (at a time when PC's were infected regularly from the old dialup bulletin boards, and from sharing tainted floppy disks) you literally could send a dos batch file with "format c:" in it and trash someone.
Up till Vista (XP does have admin/user boundaries but most apps won't work if you set up a user without admin priveleges) you did not need a year to write a virus for windows. Maybe a weekend for a sharp programmer until the antivirus people got rolling. This in contrast to Unix machines which had the user/root admin system in place over 20 years ago.
Also, Microsoft web servers have been well reported as being compromised many times over the years.
You miss my point - I'm calling bullshit on the Microsoft 90/10 theory in my post, saying there is another reason there are pretty much zero viruses on linux and osx..
I'm essentially disagreeing with the 90/10 logic that Microsoft promote. It's their propaganda that market percentages are the reason for the "slight" difference in the number of viruses for windows as compared to the Unix derivatives. They are the ones promoting the "popularity contest" theory, as a smoke screen to disguise the real reason, which is that it is trivial to create a virus for the pre Vista windows world, and it is quite a bit of work to do so for the Unix/Linux/BSD/Osx world.
Are there any published numbers for active viruses on Vista yet? That would be interesting..
All linux's run the same kernel, which is where the security model is enforced. Until Vista enforced the install as root run as user security model, a simple dos batch file has enough system access to take out an entire machine.
Said virus writer doesn't have to be anything more than the least intelligent script kiddie to succeed, and that same class of hacker doesn't have the skill set to take on anthing more serious.
The MS propaganda is that "linux is just as insecure, just not popular enough to bother". The reality is it was so damned easy to attack windows until Vista, that any fool could do it.
Unless adobe had root access, your linux operating system files were safe from adobe reader.
The unix permissions security model has been in place for well over 20 years in Unix, and as such has had a very long trial by fire.
While I agree it is not impossible, it is far more likely that your web applications got compromised.
By the way, you SHOULD NOT have direct root access at all to any IP address outside the console. Locking it to an IP address is not good enough, since the IP address can be spoofed.
How then do you remote admin? You log in to a user account via secure shell, THEN in that encrypted pipe you can sudo to root access.
The other point I was trying to make is that I do thing virus writers are trying to hack into other operating systems all the time, it's just that they seldomly succeed, by a factor of say a 16 thousand to one over windows.
The Microsoft propaganda is that there are no viruses for linux and OSC because nobody is interested. This is their explanation as to why there are 16K plus viruses for windows and pretty much none for Linux and OSX.
I'm willing to be convinced about your adobe example - can you provide enough details that one could google it and find discussions that you and "those others" shared in this exploit? Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof and all that..
Last spring my father buys a brand new shiny Toshiba laptop. It comes with Vista installed. It blue screened two or three times a day. They moved the user interface around for bullshit "usability" reasons. Dad gets pissed off after a week of this, takes it back and pays the store $300 to install XP on it.
Before the usual crowd jumps in with "It's Toshiba's fault for writing crappy drivers" bullshit, explain Exactly why the driver structure had to be changed from XP, forcing every PC manufacturer to spend time and money to retool their software for the new drivers.
Some people are going to claim the drivers had to change to improve security (performance on Vista has been proven many times to be worse than XP).
It has taken over 20 years for Microsoft to finally decide to write protect the operating system files. Something Unix learned to do in the 1980's having cut it's teeth in the multiuser networked environment of most universities (This when DOS was all MS had to offer).
Microsoft do not exactly have the reputation for ever understanfing security. Hell - Microsoft invented the email virus singlehandedly! Email used to just be ascii text, as it should be! Anyone want to put executables in a cellphone text message? Shoot them!
I assume the wholesale driver change in Vista/Windows 7 was just another bad idea at best, or a way to force hardware vendors to chose to stop supporting XP. Hardware drivers are difficult, and programmers with low level hardware experience are rare and expensive. No PC vendor wants to maintain both an XP and Vista driver team, especially when Microsoft are continually warning that the XP pipeline is about to be shut off.
People run APPLICATIONS. The operating system is just an applications launcher.
What most customers would have been happy with, is a gradual continued improvement of XP.
What Microsoft wants is continued insane growth, so every few years they bring out a complete refresh of either Office or Windows, forcing people to switch whether they like it or not, shutting off the supply of the older product, changing data formats so existing software can't work with the new stuff.
If Vista and Windows 7 were so much better, why (attempt to) shut off the supply of XP?
Please explain how acrobat had write permission to the operating system files. ---- This "No viruses for linux/bsd/osx because they are not popular" is simply microsoft propaganda. If the 90/10 market share is true, then those systems should have 10% of the virus market by that logic.
Since so many web servers out there are linux, it stands to reason that virus writers would be more motivated to attack linux, owning a much more strategic point in the web than some end user's windows PC.
Google is a massively parallel network built on linux. You're claiming no virus writers would be interested in owning the google cloud?
One has to ask, why the hell the time of day should cause the entire OS to lock up? That is incredibly bad design. These MS programmers are sure all about single points of failure, this one in a completely non critical feature!
I can understand how someone missed the boat and screwed the math, but the worst case SHOULD have been that the clock in the Zune was wrong. The clock should not even matter, a portable music player doesn't need the time of day at all!
(couldn't write themselves out of a wet paper bag...)
Politicians are all about keeping their constituents happy, this one obviously feels his voters would be angry at a tax that benefits a Smart Car owner over a Big Ass pickup truck.
It's far easier and cheaper to harvest that, and pretty much anything else right here on earth.
Same goes for the original post. Once we've covered all the usable solar cell friendly places on earth with panels, AND have run out of ways to improve their efficiency, AND have exhausted all other forms of energy here on Earth (like Geothermal - we live on a ball of molten rock with a thin skin for Pete's sake!), THEN it might make sense to look at placing solar panels in space.
to quote south park: Dumb Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb..
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong on two counts.
No it's not actually. If it were 100% perpendicular I would agree, but the car is moving forward,
the wheel is pushed into the pothole by the car's suspension, and then the wheel hits the lip of the pothole at some angle other than 90 degrees.
If the pothole was deep enough, the tire would hit the front of the pothole dead on without even touching the bottom at all, destroying the car and completely contrary to your description.
Also, no the ride would be rougher, because the back emf in the generator attached to the shock will prevent the shock from doing its job.
What WOULD make a smoother ride is the exact opposite - detect the pothole just before the tire hits it and literally lift the tire up a bit with a solenoid actuator to keep it from dropping into the pothole in the first place. This of course assumes the other three wheels are on solid flat ground and that the pothole is small enough that the car's momentum will keep it from tipping downwards as it sits on the remaining three contacted wheels.
In fact it will have a net negative effect on your gas mileage. If you put an electric (re)generator on a shock absorber, and hook it up to an electrical load (to capture the energy) then the generator will fight back when the shock absorber tries to react to the pothole. In effect, it will directly reduce the "shock absorbing" capability of the shock absorber, giving you both a rougher ride and slowing your car down more.
Since there are always losses in energy transfer, the amount you "recover" will always be less than the amount put into the system by you having to use more gas as a result of the harder bump.
It's called Back EMF, basic high school physics.
Beware the Wikipedia article on Back EMF, it loosely covers the concept but the article links to a "serious" entry about a perpetual motion machine called Perepiteia, which also would violate the laws of thermodynamics.
The "inventor" "doesn't understand how it works" and yet worked "8-12 hour days on it" making a transformer 7000% efficient!
Sigh..
It's not clear at all from the article that Google are actually using the "Microsoft Active Sync" software directly. It says they licensed the "technology".
I expect they made their own "two way" sync product for google that does not interoperate with active sync, maybe?
It's an incredibly obvious idea, just another lame patent locked down by big dollars.
You could argue that two way information sync has been going on since the first two people had an agreeable conversation.
During the height of the USSR it can be argued that they had a better education system in place than the US.
Why didn't they excel at modern technology? A total lack of a consumer electronics market to lower the price of semiconductors thru mass production.
Texas Instruments were able to grow rapidly with the sale of pocket calculators, lowering the cost of silicon and starting the Moore's law runaway train.
USSR had no such advantage, and rapidly fell behind the US in technology after the Second World War.
China gets this, and as such began to allow a form of a mass market to grow from Hong Kong inwards, modernizing their economy.
At first I too got far less calls, but in the last couple of weeks I've been getting scam calls,
a recorded voice telling me this is my last chance to set my "credit card accounts" in order, no mention of a particular brand.
Even if you managed to only get the list in the hands of Canadian telemarketers, it's pretty trivial for the list to then leak out, either directly or via some windows trojan or virus..
My guess is the scam traffic is going to increase..
Yes, known black hat servers should be blocked, but it won't help. It is trivial for a botnet designer - who ends up with a huge network of windows PC's across all ip address ranges - to randomize and encrypyt the main control point of the botnet so that blocking a couple of IP addresses would be routed around in a couple of seconds, probably automatically.
The original poster made the claim that a weakness in acrobat was used as an exploit that then trashed his linux system so badly that he had to reformat and reinstall.
The only way this could happen is if acrobat itself had root permissions.
I have over 25 years of experience with many OS's and I call bullshit back atcha.
PS, why on earth are you bothering to write a java application for Safari? By your logic you should only write for internet explorer, Mr. Blue Ocean Strategy.
Agreed, I guess my initial post was poorly worded,
since I was trying to show how silly the "Microsoft popularity theory of virus targets" propaganda was.
I've had several comments telling me the theory was a poor one. It's not my theory! :) I agree, it's a terrible theory (that was my point - it's BS from Microsoft!)
You really are ignoring the point - if a virus author can first own a web server, then he is now inserted in a position of trust with all the potentially thousands of end users who call on said server, which he can now exploit directly.
This is such an obvious advantage - and it's been done when someone sets up a web server with poor application security - the SQL insertion overrun variants being a common example.
Do you run XP without an add on firewall or virus protection tool? No? Why not? Because it's inherently insecure.
I agree that the typical linux user is a big part of why linux is a harder nut to crack.
Anyhow, we seem to disagree completely and are not producing any new or insightful ideas to the debate. Nuff said.
No, I'm pointing out that a web server is a much more valuable target than an end user's PC.
It's a central hub with a "trusted" entry point into many more of those end user PCs. You can't follow that logic? As a virus writer, would you rather own a bank's server or Grandma's home PC?
The Microsoft propaganda is that nobody writes viruses for linux because it is unpopular, not because it is inherently more secure than Windows XP.
I'm pointing out that there are plenty of interesting reasons to try to compromise a linux machine. If linux OS itself was as inherently insecure as windows XP its predecessors , no amount of effort by a professional admin would be able to keep it safe. Said google professionals chose wisely.
It's difficult to comprehend how you could misinterpret my post so badly.
As I point out to others, I'm trying to shoot down the Microsoft's popularity rule of Virus market share..
It's been trivial to attach windows, and hard to attack Unix variants, mostly because of the "install as root, run as user" model that Microsoft finally put to work in Vista. (It's there in XP but not terribly usable since many apps expect admin privileges)..
Not sure which side of the debate you're on there..
I agree with some of your points..
Some virus writers are smart, but it is so incredibly easy to write a virus for Pre Vista windows, that most virus writers don't have to be anything more than a dumbass script kiddy.
I mean, hell when Microsoft in their wisdom first enabled the passing of executables in email,
(at a time when PC's were infected regularly from the old dialup bulletin boards, and from sharing tainted floppy disks) you literally could send a dos batch file with "format c:" in it and trash someone.
Up till Vista (XP does have admin/user boundaries but most apps won't work if you set up a user without admin priveleges) you did not need a year to write a virus for windows. Maybe a weekend for a sharp programmer until the antivirus people got rolling. This in contrast to Unix machines which had the user/root admin system in place over 20 years ago.
Also, Microsoft web servers have been well reported as being compromised many times over the years.
You miss my point - I'm calling bullshit on the Microsoft 90/10 theory in my post, saying there is another reason there are pretty much zero viruses on linux and osx..
I'm essentially disagreeing with the 90/10 logic that Microsoft promote.
It's their propaganda that market percentages are the reason for the "slight" difference in the number of viruses for windows as compared to the Unix derivatives. They are the ones promoting the "popularity contest" theory, as a smoke screen to disguise the real reason, which is that it is trivial to create a virus for the pre Vista windows world,
and it is quite a bit of work to do so for the Unix/Linux/BSD/Osx world.
Are there any published numbers for active viruses on Vista yet? That would be interesting..
All linux's run the same kernel, which is where the security model is enforced.
Until Vista enforced the install as root run as user security model, a simple dos batch file has enough system access to take out an entire machine.
Said virus writer doesn't have to be anything more than the least intelligent script kiddie to succeed, and that same class of hacker doesn't have the skill set to take on anthing more serious.
The MS propaganda is that "linux is just as insecure, just not popular enough to bother". The reality is it was so damned easy to attack windows until Vista, that any fool could do it.
Unless adobe had root access, your linux operating system files were safe from adobe reader.
The unix permissions security model has been in place for well over 20 years in Unix, and as such has had a very long trial by fire.
While I agree it is not impossible, it is far more likely that your web applications got compromised.
By the way, you SHOULD NOT have direct root access at all to any IP address outside the console. Locking it to an IP address is not good enough, since the IP address can be spoofed.
How then do you remote admin? You log in to a user account via secure shell, THEN in that encrypted pipe you can sudo to root access.
The other point I was trying to make is that I do thing virus writers are trying to hack into other operating systems all the time, it's just that they seldomly succeed, by a factor of say a 16 thousand to one over windows.
The Microsoft propaganda is that there are no viruses for linux and OSC because nobody is interested. This is their explanation as to why there are 16K plus viruses for windows and pretty much none for Linux and OSX.
I'm willing to be convinced about your adobe example - can you provide enough details that one could google it and find discussions that you and "those others" shared in this exploit?
Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof and all that..
Last spring my father buys a brand new shiny Toshiba laptop. It comes with Vista installed.
It blue screened two or three times a day. They moved the user interface around for bullshit "usability" reasons.
Dad gets pissed off after a week of this, takes it back and pays the store $300 to install XP on it.
Before the usual crowd jumps in with "It's Toshiba's fault for writing crappy drivers" bullshit, explain Exactly why the driver structure had to be changed from XP, forcing every PC manufacturer to spend time and money to retool their software for the new drivers.
Some people are going to claim the drivers had to change to improve security (performance on Vista has been proven many times to be worse than XP).
It has taken over 20 years for Microsoft to finally decide to write protect the operating system files. Something Unix learned to do in the 1980's having cut it's teeth in the multiuser networked environment of most universities (This when DOS was all MS had to offer).
Microsoft do not exactly have the reputation for ever understanfing security. Hell - Microsoft invented the email virus singlehandedly! Email used to just be ascii text, as it should be!
Anyone want to put executables in a cellphone text message? Shoot them!
I assume the wholesale driver change in Vista/Windows 7 was just another bad idea at best, or a way to force hardware vendors to chose to stop supporting XP. Hardware drivers are difficult, and programmers with low level hardware experience are rare and expensive. No PC vendor wants to maintain both an XP and Vista driver team, especially when Microsoft are continually warning that the XP pipeline is about to be shut off.
IE it's part of the forced migration to Vista.
You've hit the most silly point of the OS debate.
People run APPLICATIONS. The operating system is just an applications launcher.
What most customers would have been happy with, is a gradual continued improvement of XP.
What Microsoft wants is continued insane growth, so every few years they bring out a complete refresh of either Office or Windows, forcing people to switch whether they like it or not, shutting off the supply of the older product, changing data formats so existing software can't work with the new stuff.
If Vista and Windows 7 were so much better, why (attempt to) shut off the supply of XP?
Please explain how acrobat had write permission to the operating system files.
----
This "No viruses for linux/bsd/osx because they are not popular" is simply microsoft propaganda.
If the 90/10 market share is true, then those systems should have 10% of the virus market by that logic.
Since so many web servers out there are linux, it stands to reason that virus writers would be more motivated to attack linux, owning a much more strategic point in the web than some end user's windows PC.
Google is a massively parallel network built on linux. You're claiming no virus writers would be interested in owning the google cloud?
Enough with the illogical propaganda.
Yup,
there's a real danger of confusing the biggest internet search engine with Garth Brooks ranch..
Imagine the disasters that might occur!
Ah, that does make sense..
The DRM component of HDMI connections causes honest customers lots of grief as well.
I've got the new slogan!
"Plays for sure - works 365 days a year!"
Sound good?
One has to ask, why the hell the time of day should cause the entire OS to lock up? That is incredibly bad design. These MS programmers are sure all about single points of failure, this one in a completely non critical feature!
I can understand how someone missed the boat and screwed the math, but the worst case SHOULD have been that the clock in the Zune was wrong.
The clock should not even matter, a portable music player doesn't need the time of day at all!
(couldn't write themselves out of a wet paper bag...)
Politicians are all about keeping their constituents happy, this one obviously feels his voters would be angry at a tax that benefits a Smart Car owner over a Big Ass pickup truck.
There's no oil money in Oregon is there?
It's far easier and cheaper to harvest that, and pretty much anything else right here on earth.
Same goes for the original post. Once we've covered all the usable solar cell friendly places on earth with panels, AND have run out of ways to improve their efficiency, AND have exhausted all other forms of energy here on Earth (like Geothermal - we live on a ball of molten rock with a thin skin for Pete's sake!), THEN it might make sense to look at placing solar panels in space.
to quote south park: Dumb Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb..