Imagine a lake covered in shitsmelling robots, what a sight!
Forget the sight, what about the smell!:-)
In other news (speaking of Jesus, as we were), it is a little known fact that part-way through that big party (colloquially known as 'The Last Supper'), one of the guys (colloquially known as 'The Saints') was seen to be leaning against the wall at the urinal in the classic hand-above-the-head pose and was heard to yell
'HEY JESUS, WATCH ME TURN THAT WINE BACK INTO WATER!!!'
USB 2.0 is probably a good alternative if you already have it. I would look around for just an enclosure with the firewire or USB connectors and then get a good hard drive from a reputable manufacturer.
Actually, with respect, USB 2.0 sucks the big one as far as I'm concerned. Other posters have highlighted the relatively poor performance of the usb-ide interfaces. I'm going to add to that by saying that the only place that USB 2.0 transfers data at 480Mbit/s is on sales brochures. There's the interface speed issue, and also the shared bus thing - I don't remember the technical bits, but the gist of it is that where a bunch of USB 2.0 ports share a single transaction controller (as in all but the best hubs, etc), they will compete for bandwidth, and throttle down to the speed of the lowest common denominator.
Technical issues aside, USB 2.0 is, in practice and practical experience, just slow!
You got it in one with the firewire though. Man, I just love firewire. Firewire is the bee's knees, the cat's miaow, the ducks guts! Firewire is great. It's as fast as the sales brochures say it is, it's far better behaved than USB with *nix boxes, and it just generally works!
Repeat after me: Firewire Firewire Firewire!!!
Now, I'm gonna ever-so-slightly almost contradict myself and tell you what I do: I have a bunch these . They're an extruded aluminium 'tube' with a full length PCB inside. The PCB has both firewire and usb2.0 interfaces up at the business end, and the rest of the board serves as a base to screw a laptop disk to. They have both 4 pin firewire and mini-usb ports (and a power socket - 4 pin firewire doesn't supply power, and USB bus power isn't enough to support much beyond a 20Gb disk). I actually bought one, absolutely loved it, and now I have four with 20, 40, and 80Gb disks inside. I got them from Dan, the guy who runs that web site.
(My almost self-contradiction is in the USB bit. The boxes are really handy 'cos they work with anything. I use the firewire on all of my own boxes, but where firewire isn't available, USB1.0 or 1.1 or 2.0 almost always is. So sometimes I use the USB, so shoot me!!!)
the overall percentage of unencrypted networks is still at about 80%.
Many folks seem to launch into the misinterpretation that 'unencrypted' == 'insecure'. It does not. Just because your box can talk at layer 2 or layer 3 on my wireless network doesn't mean it's going to be of any earthly use to you.
Case in point: wander around pretty much anywhere in the Haymarket, Ultimo and Broadway areas at the south end of the City of Sydney, Australia - you'll find literally dozens of open, unencrypted wilress access points, all with SSID "UTS WLAN". Natural next step for a geek is "Whoah! open wlan! I'm there!", fire up laptop, connect...
It's shortly after that that you realise that you've just helped yourself to an open, unencrypted, and completely uselesswireless network belonging to the University of Technology, Sydney. You know this because no matter *where* you point your web browser, you always get the same page: "Welcome to UTS WLAN, enter your username/password to continue". If you manage to guess a username/password, then you'll get the same page, with red writing, saying something to the effect of "oops, no IPSEC tunnel, no cigar".
That network is opened, unsecured in that you can get your machine to talk on it without authentication, but you can't talk off of it without additional rights.
Now granted, there's holes in my story. One day, some clever kid is going to figure out that he can use the wlan as his own private routed trunk from one side of the city to the other, and then the owners of the network will have to block that. Second, how hard can it be to get a username/password pair out of a drunk undergraduate? Third, this lot isn't *really* in the spirit of the story - I've built the chinesecookware, I've found, literally, hundreds of wireless nets that really are open for all to see, most of them quite likely unintentionally so.
So yes, there are a lot of unencrypted wireless networks out there, but they're not all unsecured.
Got suckered by the big screen and the bluetooth and the tri band and the gprs and stuff, didn't I. My Nokia 6600 turned out to be a lump of dodgy experimental crap that probably should never have left R&D. The phone is totally non-Nokia - all menus and functions are as non-intuitive as a third party phont, it's the first telephone to have a virus in the wild, and it won't talk to a PC for anything useful.
One might assume that, since pretty much all previous Nokias worked, that things like editing phone book data and send/receive SMS messages might work with the included Cellular Data Suite software, right? WRONG. The Nokia 6600 can't do any of this stuff, and even all the pay-ware requires you to load and run a daemon on the phone before basic functionality like that works. Bad Nokia, bad!
This is exactly right. Because, really, if someone says "internet," is there going to be any other one that you're going to confuse it with?
Yup, *millions* of them. Any network with more than one collision domain is, by definition, an 'internetwork' - commonly abbrev. to 'internet'. Now in english you can usually extrapolate the subject of a sentence by looking at context, but it's not foolproof. Wired's usage is wrong.
We refer to it as the Internet. Corporations have intranets. The capitalization conveys meaning. Wired's usage is wrong.
Technically, there's no such thing as an 'intranet' in my book. The 'intranet' word is a non word dreamed up by some tosser in marketing. (I got a telephone call from the new 'Web Manager' (another common type of tosser) the other day. Introduced himself, "Hi, I'm new here". Wanted to know my email address (everyone where I work has an email address of the form firstname.lastname@domain.tld!), said he couldn't find my details on the 'intranet'. I wrote him off as a tosser right there - he'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes!)
You get two types of networks. a 'Local Area Network' - a bunch of hosts wired together with switches and hubs, all in the same collision domain. When you join a bunch of LANs together with routers, you get an 'internetwork', commonly abbreviated to 'internet'.
The biggest and best known 'internet' is the 'Internet'.
We agree, Wired's usage is wrong - lower case 'internet' means the office WAN, nothing more.
A quick read of the user comments pages on C|Net makes it pretty clear that all of those positive comments are written by the same person with the same fractured ESL English and the same misgivings about what is 'really cool' and how to make one's life 'complete'.
Some might call this 'astroturf', but I reckon that even blind freddy could see that this grass is brown!
Now, if all slashdotters everywhere do a story submission to slashdot along the lines of "Fred Gallagher announces 'No blankets in the net Megatokyo store'", the editors will *have* to listen to us and make it a front page story... won't they?
In other news, I'm glad Fred went and did his own store (or at least 'another' store). I dunno why, but I can't help wondering if it's 'cos ThinkGeek gave him the same crap overpriced non-service as they gave me!
IIRC, the Kimiko blanket was blue, and the Miho blanket was black
Thanks, I had a sneaking feeling that I had that mixed up. I have the black Miho blanket - the Aussie dollar was in much better shape while the black one was available than back when the blue one was. Once I realised what a nice blanket it was, I wished I'd not held back, and instead bought both of them!
Hey look,.signature updates on slashdot are retrospective!
Of course your finger prints are on the bolt cutter, you picked them up.
You're showing definite signs of having watched too much American television my boy! In real life, they only screw about with the DNA analysis and fingerprints if (a) someone got killed and (b) the press are hassling a suitably highly placed politician over it. In the rest of real life, no-one has the funds or the time to fingerprint everything, and the cops certainly aren't going to bother investigating a stolen laptop.
Filing a false police report is equivalent to perjury
Who said anything about perjury? Your laptop got stolen, didn't it? So go report that your laptop got stolen. Refer my previous post - the coppers couldn't give a flying fire-truck *how* your laptop got stolen, they won't ask, and they *REALLY* don't want to hear about it (they already heard the same story a dozen times today from folks who just *needed* to tell *someone* and assumed that cops cared). Be a good citizen, give the cops the info they need for their statistics, and be on your way. It's easier for everyone that way.
'course if your laptop *didn't* get stolen and you're reporting that it did - well that's a whole different kettle of fish.
What's the problem with filing a police report. It's not like the cops care, you just rock up... "Whaddya want?" "My laptop got stolen" "Where from? Name? Got serial number? Here's your reference number. NEXT!".
The magic reference number (which is what they hand out in the state of New South Wales (where Sydney is) Australia) is all you need to satisfy the insurance claim. You get extra bonus points if you know the copper's name and can write that on the form too, but it's not required.
litigation just shines a 10 billion candlepower light on it for all the world to see.
Whereas if your story makes the slashdot front page, you can take it as a given that sooner or later someone is going to google about looking for you, find a photo of you, and link to it for all the world to see that you really do look like "overly robust geezer that makes a living walking behind the elephant with a shovel."
Man, if I looked like that, I'd be busy keeping my self out of public view, not inspiring the whole planet to take a look at my fat, ugly, shyster mug!
Google and Yahoo can get away with passing the information on without editing,
Right up until the bit where they set themselves up as editors. Deleting the 'offending' posts, if in fact they have done that, constitutes an edit. Now, they're not intermediaries any more, they're active participants, and they're editors. They put them selves in the sights of some dodgy lawyer as a result.
this is the single biggest problem that I have with all forms of censorship. Even the stuff that your boss installs to block pr0n and warez and b00bies from the office web proxy. Apart from the fact that those tools fundamentally do not work, he's setting himself up for the one day when poor sensitive Mrs Jones over in accounts catches a glipse of a goatse man or a tubgirl that the filter somehow missed. The shyste^W^W^W^W^W^Wlawyers words go something along the lines of "You undertook to protect Mrs Jones from such horrors when you installed the content filter, and you failed your duty to Mrs Jones when she saw tubgirl. J00 15 ownz3d. Giz bulk cash!".
Filtering or editing in any commercial and/or public context is just plain dumb.
Brainwashing is one of the greatest joys of parenthood.:D
Brainwashing is certainly the best bit. When it came time for my nephew to learn the colours, he had everything down pat, except for 'purple'. His Dad told him that it was called 'orange'. 'course, he had to eventually own up and explain that he was messing with his head... but while it lasted...:-)
My answer (really): I don't know to be honest, but as a general rule, laptop batteries last for about 30% to 40% of the time that the sales brochure claims they will.
Well duh! Your average "aviation writer" is flat out telling the difference between an aeroplane and a hole in the ground. Asking them to write a story that involves aeroplanes *and* computers is just asking for trouble. Why, that's like asking a six year old to pat his head and rub his stomach at the same time!
Basically the way these morons operate is that they latch on to any half-valid snippet of information - if their editor believes it, it must be true - and rush it out the door without so much as a damn about checking facts. This is 'journalism' facts have no place here!
It is routine here in Oz for the journos to get as far as identifying that an aeroplane was involved, then completely lose the plot. Nighttime TV news, for example, might run a story about somebody's grandmother smuggling a pair of nail clippers onto a Boeing 767, and show stock footage of a BAe146 landing somewhere. There's a disturbing number of six seater Cessna 210s and twin engined Piper Warriors here in Australia too, not to mention the Beechcraft KingAir jets that everyone seems to be having trouble with lately.
To put it simply, 'journalist' is a polite euphamism for 'clueless'. You're doing yourself a disservice if you think any other way!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Forget the sight, what about the smell! :-)
In other news (speaking of Jesus, as we were), it is a little known fact that part-way through that big party (colloquially known as 'The Last Supper'), one of the guys (colloquially known as 'The Saints') was seen to be leaning against the wall at the urinal in the classic hand-above-the-head pose and was heard to yell
'HEY JESUS, WATCH ME TURN THAT WINE BACK INTO WATER!!!'
Er, dude... when it's an 'HE', they're not called 'tits'... they're called manboobs!. No less gross but!
Actually, with respect, USB 2.0 sucks the big one as far as I'm concerned. Other posters have highlighted the relatively poor performance of the usb-ide interfaces. I'm going to add to that by saying that the only place that USB 2.0 transfers data at 480Mbit/s is on sales brochures. There's the interface speed issue, and also the shared bus thing - I don't remember the technical bits, but the gist of it is that where a bunch of USB 2.0 ports share a single transaction controller (as in all but the best hubs, etc), they will compete for bandwidth, and throttle down to the speed of the lowest common denominator.
Technical issues aside, USB 2.0 is, in practice and practical experience, just slow!
You got it in one with the firewire though. Man, I just love firewire. Firewire is the bee's knees, the cat's miaow, the ducks guts! Firewire is great. It's as fast as the sales brochures say it is, it's far better behaved than USB with *nix boxes, and it just generally works!
Repeat after me: Firewire Firewire Firewire !!!
Now, I'm gonna ever-so-slightly almost contradict myself and tell you what I do: I have a bunch these . They're an extruded aluminium 'tube' with a full length PCB inside. The PCB has both firewire and usb2.0 interfaces up at the business end, and the rest of the board serves as a base to screw a laptop disk to. They have both 4 pin firewire and mini-usb ports (and a power socket - 4 pin firewire doesn't supply power, and USB bus power isn't enough to support much beyond a 20Gb disk). I actually bought one, absolutely loved it, and now I have four with 20, 40, and 80Gb disks inside. I got them from Dan, the guy who runs that web site.
(My almost self-contradiction is in the USB bit. The boxes are really handy 'cos they work with anything. I use the firewire on all of my own boxes, but where firewire isn't available, USB1.0 or 1.1 or 2.0 almost always is. So sometimes I use the USB, so shoot me!!!)
OI!!! I resemble that remark!
Many folks seem to launch into the misinterpretation that 'unencrypted' == 'insecure'. It does not. Just because your box can talk at layer 2 or layer 3 on my wireless network doesn't mean it's going to be of any earthly use to you.
Case in point: wander around pretty much anywhere in the Haymarket, Ultimo and Broadway areas at the south end of the City of Sydney, Australia - you'll find literally dozens of open, unencrypted wilress access points, all with SSID "UTS WLAN". Natural next step for a geek is "Whoah! open wlan! I'm there!", fire up laptop, connect...
It's shortly after that that you realise that you've just helped yourself to an open, unencrypted, and completely useless wireless network belonging to the University of Technology, Sydney. You know this because no matter *where* you point your web browser, you always get the same page: "Welcome to UTS WLAN, enter your username/password to continue". If you manage to guess a username/password, then you'll get the same page, with red writing, saying something to the effect of "oops, no IPSEC tunnel, no cigar".
That network is opened, unsecured in that you can get your machine to talk on it without authentication, but you can't talk off of it without additional rights.
Now granted, there's holes in my story. One day, some clever kid is going to figure out that he can use the wlan as his own private routed trunk from one side of the city to the other, and then the owners of the network will have to block that. Second, how hard can it be to get a username/password pair out of a drunk undergraduate? Third, this lot isn't *really* in the spirit of the story - I've built the chinese cookware, I've found, literally, hundreds of wireless nets that really are open for all to see, most of them quite likely unintentionally so.
So yes, there are a lot of unencrypted wireless networks out there, but they're not all unsecured.
So... business at usual over at Microsoft huh?
One might assume that, since pretty much all previous Nokias worked, that things like editing phone book data and send/receive SMS messages might work with the included Cellular Data Suite software, right? WRONG. The Nokia 6600 can't do any of this stuff, and even all the pay-ware requires you to load and run a daemon on the phone before basic functionality like that works. Bad Nokia, bad!
/rant!
Yup, *millions* of them. Any network with more than one collision domain is, by definition, an 'internetwork' - commonly abbrev. to 'internet'. Now in english you can usually extrapolate the subject of a sentence by looking at context, but it's not foolproof. Wired's usage is wrong.
Technically, there's no such thing as an 'intranet' in my book. The 'intranet' word is a non word dreamed up by some tosser in marketing. (I got a telephone call from the new 'Web Manager' (another common type of tosser) the other day. Introduced himself, "Hi, I'm new here". Wanted to know my email address (everyone where I work has an email address of the form firstname.lastname@domain.tld!), said he couldn't find my details on the 'intranet'. I wrote him off as a tosser right there - he'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes!)
You get two types of networks. a 'Local Area Network' - a bunch of hosts wired together with switches and hubs, all in the same collision domain. When you join a bunch of LANs together with routers, you get an 'internetwork', commonly abbreviated to 'internet'.
The biggest and best known 'internet' is the 'Internet'.
We agree, Wired's usage is wrong - lower case 'internet' means the office WAN, nothing more.
Some might call this 'astroturf', but I reckon that even blind freddy could see that this grass is brown!
In other news, I'm glad Fred went and did his own store (or at least 'another' store). I dunno why, but I can't help wondering if it's 'cos ThinkGeek gave him the same crap overpriced non-service as they gave me!
Thanks, I had a sneaking feeling that I had that mixed up. I have the black Miho blanket - the Aussie dollar was in much better shape while the black one was available than back when the blue one was. Once I realised what a nice blanket it was, I wished I'd not held back, and instead bought both of them!
Hey look, .signature updates on slashdot are retrospective!
You're showing definite signs of having watched too much American television my boy! In real life, they only screw about with the DNA analysis and fingerprints if (a) someone got killed and (b) the press are hassling a suitably highly placed politician over it. In the rest of real life, no-one has the funds or the time to fingerprint everything, and the cops certainly aren't going to bother investigating a stolen laptop.
Who said anything about perjury? Your laptop got stolen, didn't it? So go report that your laptop got stolen. Refer my previous post - the coppers couldn't give a flying fire-truck *how* your laptop got stolen, they won't ask, and they *REALLY* don't want to hear about it (they already heard the same story a dozen times today from folks who just *needed* to tell *someone* and assumed that cops cared). Be a good citizen, give the cops the info they need for their statistics, and be on your way. It's easier for everyone that way.
'course if your laptop *didn't* get stolen and you're reporting that it did - well that's a whole different kettle of fish.
The magic reference number (which is what they hand out in the state of New South Wales (where Sydney is) Australia) is all you need to satisfy the insurance claim. You get extra bonus points if you know the copper's name and can write that on the form too, but it's not required.
Whereas if your story makes the slashdot front page, you can take it as a given that sooner or later someone is going to google about looking for you, find a photo of you, and link to it for all the world to see that you really do look like "overly robust geezer that makes a living walking behind the elephant with a shovel."
Man, if I looked like that, I'd be busy keeping my self out of public view, not inspiring the whole planet to take a look at my fat, ugly, shyster mug!
Right up until the bit where they set themselves up as editors. Deleting the 'offending' posts, if in fact they have done that, constitutes an edit. Now, they're not intermediaries any more, they're active participants, and they're editors. They put them selves in the sights of some dodgy lawyer as a result.
this is the single biggest problem that I have with all forms of censorship. Even the stuff that your boss installs to block pr0n and warez and b00bies from the office web proxy. Apart from the fact that those tools fundamentally do not work, he's setting himself up for the one day when poor sensitive Mrs Jones over in accounts catches a glipse of a goatse man or a tubgirl that the filter somehow missed. The shyste^W^W^W^W^W^Wlawyers words go something along the lines of "You undertook to protect Mrs Jones from such horrors when you installed the content filter, and you failed your duty to Mrs Jones when she saw tubgirl. J00 15 ownz3d. Giz bulk cash!".
Filtering or editing in any commercial and/or public context is just plain dumb.
What's next, a license to spell?
Brainwashing is certainly the best bit. When it came time for my nephew to learn the colours, he had everything down pat, except for 'purple'. His Dad told him that it was called 'orange'. 'course, he had to eventually own up and explain that he was messing with his head... but while it lasted... :-)
Hmmm, I smell a karma-grab by the age old read-the-article-and-quote-salient-point technique! :-)
My answer (really): I don't know to be honest, but as a general rule, laptop batteries last for about 30% to 40% of the time that the sales brochure claims they will.
Always gets a laugh, but I'm *serious*!
Well, that snippet alone ought to get the left wing radicals a-screamin' and a-yellin'!
Well duh! Your average "aviation writer" is flat out telling the difference between an aeroplane and a hole in the ground. Asking them to write a story that involves aeroplanes *and* computers is just asking for trouble. Why, that's like asking a six year old to pat his head and rub his stomach at the same time!
Basically the way these morons operate is that they latch on to any half-valid snippet of information - if their editor believes it, it must be true - and rush it out the door without so much as a damn about checking facts. This is 'journalism' facts have no place here!
It is routine here in Oz for the journos to get as far as identifying that an aeroplane was involved, then completely lose the plot. Nighttime TV news, for example, might run a story about somebody's grandmother smuggling a pair of nail clippers onto a Boeing 767, and show stock footage of a BAe146 landing somewhere. There's a disturbing number of six seater Cessna 210s and twin engined Piper Warriors here in Australia too, not to mention the Beechcraft KingAir jets that everyone seems to be having trouble with lately.
To put it simply, 'journalist' is a polite euphamism for 'clueless'. You're doing yourself a disservice if you think any other way! :-)